Chains

by Theodore Dreiser

VIII

But even this is not the end, however ready you may be to cease listening. There is an envoi that I must add. This was seven years later. By then I had removed to New York and established myself as a cartoonist. From others I had learned that Steele also had come to New York and was now connected with one of the local papers in some moderately responsible capacity—copy reading, I think. At any rate, I met him—one Sunday. It was near the entrance of the Bronx Zoo, at closing time. He was there with his wife and a second little son that had come to him since he had left G——. The first one—a boy of ten by then, I presume—was not present. All this I learned in the course of the brief conversation that followed.

But his wife! I can never forget her. She was so worn, so faded, so impossible. And this other boy by her—a son who had followed after their reunion! My God! I thought, how may not fear or convention slay one emotionally! And to cap it all, he was not so much apologetic as—I will not say defiant—but ingratiating and volubly explanatory about his safe and sane retreat from gayety and freedom, and, if you will, immorality. For he knew, of course, that I recalled the other case—all its troublesome and peculiar details.

“My wife! My wife!” he exclaimed quickly, since I did not appear to recognize her at first, and with a rather grandiose gesture of the hand, as who should say, “I am proud of my wife, as you see. I am still married to her and rightly so. I am not the same person you knew in G—— at all—at all!”

“Oh, yes,” I replied covering them all with a single glance. “I remember your wife very well. And your boy.”

“Oh, no, not that boy,” he hastened to explain. “That was Harry. This is another little boy—Francis.” And then, as though to re-establish his ancient social prestige with me, he proceeded to add: “We’re living over on Staten Island now—just at the north end, near the ferry, you know. You must come down some time. It’s a pleasant ride. We’ll both be so glad to see you. Won’t we, Estelle?”

“Yes, certainly,” said Mrs. Steele.

I hastened away as quickly as possible. The contrast was too much; that damned memory of mine, illegitimate as it may seem to be, was too much. I could not help thinking of the Ira Ramsdell and of how much I had envied him the dances, the love, the music, the moonlight.

“By God!” I exclaimed as I walked away. “By God!”

And that is exactly how I feel now about all such miscarriages of love and delight—cold and sad.

VI
KHAT

“O, thou blessed that contains no demon, but a fairy! When I follow thee thou takest me into regions overlooking Paradise. My sorrows are as nothing. My rags are become as robes of silk. My feet are shod, not worn and bleeding. I lift up my head——O Flower of Paradise! O Flower of Paradise!”

Old Arabian Song.

“When the European is weary he calls for alcohol to revive him; when he is joyful he thinks of wine that he may have more joy. In like manner the Chinese wooes his ‘white lady,’ the poppy flower. The Indian chews bhang, and the West African seeks surcease in kola. To the Yemen Arab, khat, the poor man’s happiness, his ‘flower of paradise,’ is more than any of these to its devotees. It is no narcotic compelling sleep, but a stimulant like alcohol, a green shrub that grows upon the hills in moist places. On the roads leading to the few cities of Arabia, and in the cities themselves, it may be seen being borne on the backs of camels to the market-place or the wedding feast—the wet and dripping leaves of the shrub. The poor and the well-to-do at once crave and adore it. They speak of it as ‘the strength of the weak,’ ‘the inspiration of the depressed,’ ‘the dispeller of sorrow and too deep care.’ All who may, buy and chew it, the poor by the anna’s worth, the rich by the rupee. The beggar when he can beg or steal it—even he is happy too.”

American Consular Report.

The dawn had long since broken over the heat-weary cup and slopes of the Mugga Valley, in which lies Hodeidah. In the centre of the city, like a mass of upturned yellow cups and boxes surrounded by a ring of green and faced by the sea, were the houses, with their streets and among and in them the shopkeepers of streets or ways busy about the labors of the day. Al Hajjaj, the cook, whose place was near the mosque in the centre of the public square, had already set his pots and pans over the fire and washed his saucers and wiped his scales and swept his shop and sprinkled it. And indeed his fats and oils were clear and his spices fragrant, and he himself was standing behind his cooking pots ready to serve customers. Likewise those who dealt in bread, ornaments, dress goods, had put forth such wares as they had to offer. In the mosque a few of the faithful had entered to pray. Over the dust of the ill-swept street, not yet cleared of the rubbish of the day before, the tikka gharries of the better-to-do dragged their way along the road about various errands. The same was speckled with natives in bright or dull attire, some alive with the interest of business, others dull because of a life that offered little.

In his own miserable wattle-covered shed or hut, no more than an abandoned donkey’s stall at the edge of the city, behold Ibn Abdullah. Beggar, ne’er-do-well, implorer of charity before the mosque, ex-water-carrier and tobacco seller in Mecca and Medina, from whence he had been driven years before by his extortions and adulterations, he now turned wearily, by no means anxious to rise although it was late. For why rise when you are old and weary and ragged, and life offers at best only a little food and sleep—or not so much food as (best and most loved of all earthly blessings) khat, the poor man’s friend? For that, more than food or drink, he craved. Yet how to come by it was a mystery. There was about him not a single anna wherewith to sate his needs—not so much as a pice!

Indeed, as Ibn Abdullah now viewed his state, he had about reached the end of his earthly tether. His career was and had been a failure. Born in the mountain district back of Hodeidah, in the little village of Sabar, source of the finest khat, where formerly his father had been a khat farmer, his mother a farmer’s helper, he had wandered far, here and there over Arabia and elsewhere, making a living as best he might: usually by trickery. Once for a little while he had been a herdsman with a Bedouin band, and had married a daughter of the tribe, but, restlessness and a lust of novelty overcoming him, he had, in time, deserted his wife and wandered hence. Thence to Jiddah, the port of debarkation for pilgrims from Egypt and Central Africa approaching Mecca and Medina, the birthplace and the burialplace of the Prophet. Selling trinkets and sacred relics, water and tobacco and fruit and food, and betimes indulging in trickery and robbery, he had finally been taken in the toils of the Cadis of both Mecca and Medina, by whose henchmen he had been sadly drubbed on his back and feet and ordered away, never to return. Venturing once more into the barren desert, a trailer of caravans, he had visited Taif, Taraba and Makhwa, but finding life tedious in these smaller places he had finally drifted southward along the coast of the Red Sea to the good city of Hodeidah, where, during as many as a dozen years now, he had been eking out a wretched existence, story-telling, selling tobacco (when he could get it) or occasionally false relics to the faithful. Having grown old in this labor, his tales commonplace, his dishonesty and lack of worth and truth well known, he was now weary and helpless, truly one near an unhonored end.

Time was, in his better days and greater strength, as he now bethought him on this particular morning, when he had had his full share of khat, and food too. Ay-ee! There had been some excellent days in the past, to be sure! Not even old Raschid, the khat drunkard, or Al Hajjaj, the cook, who might be seen of a late afternoon before his shop, his pillow and carpets and water chatties about him, his narghili lit, a bunch of khat by his side, his wife and daughter at the window above listening to him and his friends as they smoked or chewed and discoursed, had more of khat and food than had he. By Allah, things were different then! He had had his girls, too, his familiar places in the best of the mabrazes, where were lights and delightful strains of song, and dancing betimes. He had sung and applauded and recounted magnificent adventures with the best of them. Ay-ee!

But of late he had not done well—not nearly as well as in times past. He was very, very old now, that was the reason; his bones ached and even creaked. An undue reputation for evil things done in the past—Inshallah! no worse than those of a million others—pursued him wherever he went. It was remembered of him, unfortunately, here in Hodeidah, as in Mecca and Medina (due no doubt to the lying, blasting tongue—may it wither in his mouth!—of Tahrbulu, the carrier, whom he had known in Mecca)—that he had been bastinadoed there for adulterating the tobacco he sold—a little dried goats’ and camels’ dung, wind-blown and clean; and as for Taif, to which place he had gone after Mecca, Firaz, the ex-caravan guard who had known him in that place—the dog!—might his bones wither in the sun!—had recalled to various and sundry that at Mecca he had been imprisoned for selling water from a rain-pit as that of the sacred well of Jezer! Be it so; he was hard pressed at the time; there was no place to turn; business was poor—and great had been his yearning for khat.

But since then he had aged and wearied and all his efforts at an honest livelihood had served him ill. Betimes his craving for khat had grown, the while his ability to earn it—aye, even to beg it with any success!—had decreased. Here in Hodeidah he was too well known (alas, much too well known!), and yet where else was he to go? By sea it was all of three hundred miles to Aden, a great and generous place, so it was said, but how was he to get there at his time of life? No captain would carry him. He would be tossed into the sea like a rat. Had he not begged and been roundly cursed? And to Jiddah, whereby thousands came to Mecca, a full five hundred miles north, he dare not return. Were he there, no doubt he would do better: the faithful were generous.... But were he caught in the realm of the Grand Sherif— No; Hodeidah had its advantages.

He arose after a time, and, without ablutions, prostrating himself weakly in the direction of Mecca, adjusted his ragged loin- and shoulder-cloths and prepared to emerge for the day. Although hungry and weak, it was not food but khat that he desired, a few leaves of the green, succulent, life-giving plant that so restored his mood and strength and faculties generally. By Allah, if he had but a little, a handful, his thoughts concerning life would be so much more endurable. He might even, though cracked and wretched was his voice, tell a tale or two to idlers and so earn an honest anna. Or he would have more courage to beg, to lie, to mourn before the faithful. Yea, had he not done so often? With it he was as good as any man, as young, as hopeful; without it—well, he was as he was: feeble and worn.

As he went forth finally along the hot, dusty road which led into the city and the public market and mosque, lined on either side by low one-story mud houses of the poor, windowless, and with the roadway in front as yet unswept, his thoughts turned in eager seeking to the khat market, hard by the public square and beyond the mosque, whose pineapple-shaped dome he could even now see rising in the distance over the low roofs before him. Here it was that at about eleven o’clock in the morning the khat camels bearing their succulent loads would come winding along the isthmus road from the interior. He could see them now, hear their bells, the long striding camels, their shouting drivers, the green herb, wet and sweet, piled in refreshing masses upon their backs! How well he knew the process of its arrival—the great rock beyond the Jiddah gate casting a grateful shade, the two little black policemen ready to take custom toll of each load and give a receipt, the huge brutes halting before the door of the low kutcha-thatched inn, there to pick at some wisps of grass while their masters went inside to have a restful pull at a hubbuk (water-pipe) and a drink of kishr, or maybe a bowl of curds. Meanwhile, a flock of shrewd youngsters, bribelings of the merchants of the bazaars within the city, would flit about the loaded animals, seeking to steal a leaf or to thrust an appraising glance into the closely wrapped bundles, in order that they might report as to the sweetness and freshness of their respective loads.

“What, O kowasji, is the quality of your khat to-day? Which beast carries the best, and has thy driver stinted no water on the journey to keep it fresh?”

To find true answers to these questions had these urchins taken their bribe-money in the bazaars. But the barefoot policeman would chase them away, the refreshed drivers would come out again, fiercely breathing calumnies against the grandmothers of such brats, and the little caravan would pick its way upward and downward again into the market.

But to-day, too weary to travel so far, even though by sighs and groans and many prayers for their well-being he might obtain so little as a leaf or two from the comfortable drivers, he betook himself slowly toward the market itself. En route, and especially as he neared a better portion of the city, where tikka gharries might be seen, he was not spareful of “Alms, in the name of Allah! Allah! Alms!” or “May thy hours in paradise be endless!” But none threw him so much as a pice. Instead, those who recognized his familiar figure, the sad antithesis of all industry and well-being, turned away or called: “Out of the way, thou laggard! To one side, dog!”

When he reached the market, however, not without having cast a wishful eye at the shining pots and saucers of Al Hajjaj en route, the adjoining bazaar had heard of the coming of the green-laden caravan, and from the dark shops, so silent until now, cheerful cries were beginning to break forth. Indeed the streets were filled with singing and a stream of lean figures all headed one way. Like himself they were going to the khat market, only so much better equipped for the occasion—rupees and anna in plenty for so necessary and delectable an herb. Tikka gharries rattled madly past him, whips were waved and turbans pushed awry; there were flashes of color from rich men’s gowns, as they hurried to select the choicest morsels, the clack of oryx-hide sandals, and the blunt beating of tom-toms. As the camels arrived in the near distance, the market was filled with a restless, yelling mob. Bedlam had broken loose, but a merry, good-natured bedlam at that. For khat, once obtained, would ease whatever ill feeling or morning unrest or weariness one might feel.

Although without a pice wherewith to purchase so much as a stalk, still Ibn could not resist the temptation of entering here. What, were none of the faithful merciful? By Allah, impossible! Perchance—who knows?—there might be a stranger, a foreigner, who in answer to his appealing glance, his outstretched hands, an expression of abject despair which long since he had mastered, would cast him an anna, or even a rupee (it had happened!), or some one, seeing him going away empty-handed or standing at the gate outside, forlorn and cast down, and asking always alms, alms, would cast him a delicious leaf or spray of the surpassing delight.

But no; this day, as on the day previous, and the one before that, he had absolutely no success. What was it—the hand of fate itself? Had Allah truly forsaken him at last? In a happy babel, and before his very eyes, the delicious paradisiacal stimulant was weighed on government scales and taxed again—the Emir must live! And then, divided into delicious bundles the thickness of a man’s forearm, it was offered for sale. Ah, the beauty of those bundles—the delight therein contained—the surcease even now! The proud sellers, in turban and shirt, were mounting the small tables or stands about the place and beginning to auction it off, each bundle bringing its own price. “Min kam! Min kam!” Hadji, the son of Dodow, was now crying—Hadji, whom Ibn had observed this many a day as a seller here. He was waving a bunch above the outstretched hands of the crowd. “How much? How much will you give for this flower of paradise, this bringer of happiness, this dispeller of all weakness? ’Tis as a maiden’s eyes. ’Tis like bees’ breath for fragrance. ’Tis—”

“That I might buy!” sighed Ibn heavily. “That I might buy! Who will give me so much as a spray?”

“One anna” (two cents), yelled a mirthful and contemptuous voice, knowing full well the sacrilege of the offer.

“Thou scum! O thou miserable little tick on the back of a sick camel!” replied the seller irritably. “May my nose grow a beard if it is not worth two rupees at the very least!”

“Bismillah! There is not two rupees’ worth in all thy filthy godown, budmash!”

“Thou dog! Thou detractor! But why should one pay attention to one who has not so much as an anna wherewith to ease himself? To those who have worth and many rupees—look, behold, how green, how fresh!”

And Al Hajjaj, the cook, and Ahmed, the carpet-weaver, stepped forward and took each a bunch for a rupee, the while Ibn Abdullah, hanging upon the skirt of the throng and pushed contemptuously here and there, eyed it all sadly. Other bundles in the hands of other sellers were held up and quickly disposed of—to Chudi, the baker, Azad Bakht, the barber, Izz-al-Din, the seller of piece goods, and so on, until within the hour all was exhausted and the place deserted. On the floor was now left only the litter and débris of stems and deadened leaves, to be haggled over by the hadjis (vendors of firewood), the sweepers, scavengers and beggars generally, of whom he was one; only for the want of a few pice, an anna at the most, he would not even now be allowed to carry away so much as a stem of this, so ill had been his fortunes these many, many days. In this pell-mell scene, where so many knew him and realized the craving wherewith he was beset, not one paused to offer him a sprig. He was as wretched as before, only hungrier and thirstier.

And then, once the place was finally deserted, not a leaf or a stem upon the ground, he betook himself slowly and wearily to his accustomed place in the shadow of one of the six columns which graced the entryway of the mosque (the place of beggars), there to lie and beseech of all who entered or left that they should not forget the adjuration of the Prophet “and give thy kinsman his due and the poor and the son of the road.” At noon he entered with others and prayed, for there at least he was welcome, but alas, his thoughts were little on the five prescribed daily prayers and the morning and evening ablutions—no, not even upon food, but rather upon khat. How to obtain it—a leaf—a stem!

Almost perforce his thoughts now turned to the days of his youth, when as a boy living on the steep terraced slope of the mountains between Taiz and Yerim, he was wont literally to dwell among the small and prosperous plantations of the khat farmers who flourished there in great numbers. Indeed, before his time, his father had been one such, and Sabar and Hirwa, two little villages in the Taiz district, separated only by a small hill, and in the former of which he was born, were famous all over Arabia for the khat that was raised there. Next to that which came from Bokhari, the khat of Sabar, his home town, was and remained the finest in all Yemen. Beside it even that of Hirwa was coarse, thin and astringent, and more than once he had heard his mother, who was a khat-picker, say that one might set out Sabari plants in Hirwa and that they quickly became coarse, but remove Hirwa plants to Sabar, and they grew sweet and delicate.

And there as a child he—who could not now obtain even so much as a leaf of life-giving khat!—had aided his mother in picking or cutting the leaves and twigs of khat that constituted the crops of this region—great camel-loads of it! In memory now he could see the tasks of the cooler months, where, when new fields were being planted, they were started from cuttings buried in shallow holes four to six inches apart with space enough between the rows for pickers to pass; how the Yemen cow and the sad-eyed camel, whose maw was never full, had to be guarded against, since they had a nice taste in cuttings, and thorn twigs and spiny cactus leaves had to be laid over the young shoots to discourage the marauders.

At the end of a year the young shrubs, now two feet high, had a spread of thick green foliage eighteen inches in diameter. Behold now the farmer going out into the dawn of each morning to gaze at his field and the sky, in the hope of seeing the portents of harvest time. On a given morning the air would be thick with bulbuls, sparrows, weaver birds, shrilly clamoring; they would rise and fall above the plants, picking at the tenderest leaves. “Allah be praised!” would cry the farmer in delight. “The leaves are sweet and ripe for the market!” And now he would call his women and the wives of his neighbors to the crop-picking. Under a bower of jasmine vines, with plumes of the sweet smelling rehan, the farmer and his cronies would gather to drink from tiny cups and smoke the hubbuk, while the womenfolk brought them armfuls of the freshly cut khat leaves. What a joyous time it was for all the village, for always the farmer distributed the whole of his first crop among his neighbors, in the name of Allah, that Allah’s blessings might thus be secured on all the succeeding ones. Would that he were in Sabar or Hirwa once more!

But all this availed him nothing. He was sick and weary, with little strength and no money wherewith to return; besides, if he did, the fame of his evil deeds would have preceded him perhaps. Again, here in Hodeidah, as elsewhere in Arabia, the cities and villages especially, khat-chewing was not only an appetite but a habit, and even a social custom or function, with the many, and required many rupees the year to satisfy. Indeed one of the painful things in connection with all this was that, not unlike eating in other countries, or tea at least, it had come to involve a paraphernalia and a ritual all its own, one might say. At this very noon hour here in Hodeidah, when, because of his luck, he was here before the temple begging instead of having a comfortable home of his own, hundreds—aye, thousands—who an hour earlier might have been seen wending their way happily homeward from the market, their eyes full of a delicious content, their jaws working, a bundle of the precious leaves under their arms, might now be found in their private or public mabraz making themselves comfortable, chewing and digesting this same, and not until the second hour of the afternoon would they again be seen. They all had this, their delight, to attend to!

Aye, go to the house of any successful merchant, (only the accursed Jews and the outlanders did not use khat) between these hours and say that you had urgent news for him or that you had come to buy a lakh of rupees’ worth of skins.... His servant would meet you on the verandah (accursed dogs! How well he knew them and their airs!) and offer the profoundest apologies ... the master would be unutterably sick (here he would begin to weep), or his sister’s husband’s aunt’s mother had died this very morning and full of unutterable woe as he was he would be doing no business; or certainly he had gone to Tawahi but assuredly would return by three. Would the caller wait? And at that very moment the rich dog would be in his mabraz at the top of his house smoking his hubbuk and chewing his leaves—he who only this morning had refused Ibn so much as a leaf! Bismillah! Let him rot like a dead jackal!

Or was it one who was less rich? Behold the public mabraz, such as he—Ibn—dared not even look into save as a wandering teller of tales, or could only behold from afar. For here these prosperous swine could take their ease in the heat of the day, cool behind trellised windows of these same, or at night could dream where were soft lights and faint strains of song, where sombre shadow-steeped figures swayed as though dizzy with the sound of their own voices, chanting benedictions out of the Koran or the Prophets. Had he not told tales for them in his time, the uncharitable dogs? Even now, at this noon hour, one might see them, the habitués of these same well-ventilated and well-furnished public rooms, making off in state for their favorite diversion, their khat tied up in a bright shawl and conspicuously displayed—for whom except himself, so poor or so low that he could not afford a little?—and all most anxious that all the world should know that they went thus to enjoy themselves. In the mabraz, each one his rug and pillow arranged for him, he would recline, occupying the space assigned him and no more. By his side would be the tall narghili or hubbuk, the two water-pots or chatties on copper stands, and a bowl of sweets. Bismillah, he was no beggar! When the mabraz was comfortably filled with customers a servant would come and light the pipes, some one would produce a Koran or commence a story—not he any more, for they would not have him, such was his state—and the afternoon’s pleasure would begin. Occasionally the taraba (a kind of three-stringed viol) would be played, or, as it might happen, a favorite singer be present. Then the happy cries of “Taieeb!” or “Marhabba! Marhabba!” (Good!), or the more approbative “O friend, excellent indeed!” would be heard. How well he remembered his own share in all this in former years, and how little the knowledge of it all profited him now—how little! Ah, what a sadness to be old and a beggar in the face of so much joy!

But as he mused in the shade, uttering an occasional “Alms, alms, in the name of Allah!” as one or another of the faithful entered or left the mosque, there came from the direction of the Jiddah gate, the regular khat-bearing camel route, shrill cries and yells. Looking up now, he saw a crowd of boys racing toward the town, shouting as they ran: “Al khat aja!” (the khat has come), a thing which of itself boded something unusual—a marriage or special feast of some kind, for at this late hour for what other reason would khat be brought? The market was closed; the chewers of khat already in their mabrazes. From somewhere also, possibly in the house of a bridegroom, came the faint tunk-a-lunk of a tom-tom, which now seemed to take up the glad tidings and beat out its summons to the wedding guests.

“Bismillah! What means this?” commented the old beggar to himself, his eyes straining in the direction of the crowd; then folding his rags about him he proceeded to limp in the direction of the noise. At the turn of a narrow street leading into the square his eye was gladdened truly enough by the sight of a khat-bearing camel, encompassed by what in all likelihood, and as he well knew was the custom on such occasions, a cloud of “witnesses” (seekers of entertainment or food at any feast) to the probable approaching marriage. Swathed round the belly of the camel as it came and over its load of dripping green herbs, was laid a glorious silken cloth, blazing with gold and hung with jasmine sprays; and though tom-toms thumped and fifes squealed a furious music all about him, the solemn beast bore his burden as if it were some majesty of state.

“By Allah,” observed the old beggar wearily yet eyeing the fresh green khat with zest, “that so much joy should be and I have not a pice, let alone an anna! Would that I might take a spray—that one might fall!”

“Friend,” he ventured after a moment, turning to a water-carrier who was standing by, one almost as poor as himself if more industrious, “what means this? Has not Ramazan passed and is not Mohorrum yet to come?”

“Dost thou address me, thou bag of bones?” returned the carrier, irritated by this familiarity on the part of one less than himself.

“Sahib,” returned the beggar respectfully, using a term which he knew would flatter the carrier, no more entitled to a “Sir” than himself, “use me not ill. I am in sore straits and weak. Is it for a marriage or a dance, perhaps?”

“Thou hast said,” replied the carrier irritably, “—of Zeila, daughter of old Bhori, the tin-seller in the bazaar, to Abdul, whose father is jemidar of chaprassies at the burra bungalow.”

At the mere mention of marriage there came into the mind of Ibn the full formula for any such in Hodeidah—for had he not attended them in his time, not so magnificent as this perhaps but marriages of sorts? From noon on all the relatives and friends invited would begin to appear in twos and threes in the makhdara, where all preparations for the entertainment of the guests had no doubt been made. Here for them to sit on in so rich a case as this (or so he had heard in the rumored affairs of the rich), would be long benches of stone or teak, and upon them beautiful carpets and pillows. (In all the marriages he had been permitted to attend these were borrowed for the occasion from relatives or friends.) Madayeh, or water-bubbles, would be ready, although those well enough placed in the affairs of this world would prefer to bring their own, carried by a servant. A lot of little chatties for the pipes would be on hand, as well as a number of fire-pots, these latter outside the makhdara with a dozen boys, fan in hand, ready to refill for each guest his pipe with tobacco and fire on the first call of “Ya yi-yall!” How well he remembered his services as a pipe-filler on occasions of this kind in his youth, how well his pleasure as guest or friend, relative even on one occasion, in his earlier and more prosperous years and before he had become an outcast, when his own pipe had been filled. Oh, the music! the bowls of sweets! the hot kishr, the armful of delicious khat, and before and after those little cakes of wheat with butter and curds! When the makhdara was full and all the guests had been solemnly greeted by the father of the bride, as well as by the prospective husband, khat would be distributed, and the pleasure of chewing it begin. Ah! Yes, weddings were wonderful and very well in their way indeed, provided one came by anything through them.

Alas, here, as in the case of the market sales, his opportunities for attending the same with any profit to himself, the privilege of sharing in the delights and comforts of the same, were over. He had no money, no repute, not even respect. Indeed the presence of a beggar such as he on an occasion of this kind, and especially here in Hodeidah where were many rich, would be resented, taken almost as an evil omen. Not only the guests within but those poorer admirers without, such as these who but now followed the camel, would look upon his even so much as distant approach as a vile intrusion, lawless, worthless dog that he was, come to peek and pry and cast a shadow upon what would otherwise be a happy occasion.

Yet he could not resist the desire to follow a portion of the way, anyhow. The escorted khat looked too enticing. Bismillah! There must be some one who would throw him a leaf on so festal an occasion, surely! By a slow and halting process therefore he came finally before the gate of the residence, into which already the camel had disappeared. Before it was the usual throng of those not so vastly better than himself who had come to rejoice for a purpose, and within, the sound of the tom-tom and voices singing. Over the gate and out of the windows were hung silken carpets and jasmine sprays, for old Bhori was by no means poor in this world’s goods.

While recognizing a number who might have been tolerant of him, Ibn Abdullah also realized rather painfully that of the number of these who were most friendly, having known him too long as a public beggar, there were few.

“What! Ne’er-do-well!” cried one who recognized him as having been publicly bastinadoed on one occasion here years before, when he had been younger and healthy enough to be a vendor of tobacco, for adulterating his tobacco. “Do you come here, too?” Then turning to another he called: “Look who comes here—Ibn, the rich man! A friend of the good Bhori, no doubt, mayhap a relative, or at least one of his invited guests!”

“Ay-ee, a friend of the groom at least!” cried another.

“Or a brother or cousin of the bride!” chaffed still a third.

“A rich and disappointed seeker after her hand!” declared a fourth titteringly.

“He brings rich presents, as one can see!” proclaimed a fifth. “But look now at his hands!” A chortle followed, joined in by many.

“And would he be content with so little as a spray of khat in return?” queried a sixth.

“By Allah, an honest tobacco-merchant! Bismillah! One whom the Cadi loves!” cried a seventh.

For answer Ibn turned a solemn and craving eye upon them, thinking only of khat. “Inshallah! Peace be with thee, good citizens!” he returned. “Abuse not one who is very low in his state. Alms! Alms! A little khat, of all that will soon generously be bestowed upon thee! Alms!”

“Away, old robber!” cried one of them. “If you had ever been honest you would not now be poor.”

“What, old jackal, dost thou come here to beg? What brings thee from the steps of the mosque? Are the praying faithful so ungenerous? By Allah! Likely they know thee—not?”

“Peace! Peace! And mayst thou never know want and distress such as mine! Food I have not had for three days. My bones yearn for so much as a leaf of khat. Be thou generous and of all that is within, when a portion is given thee give me but a leaf!”

“The Cadi take thee!”

“Dog!”

“Beggar!”

“Come not too near, thou bag of decay!”

So they threatened him and he came no closer, removing rather to a safe distance and eyeing as might a lorn jackal a feast partaken of by lions.

Yet having disposed of this objectionable intruder in this fashion, no khat was as yet forthcoming, the reason being that it was not yet time. Inside, the wedding ceremony and feast, a matter of slow and ordered procedure, was going forward with great care. Kishr was no doubt now being drunk, and there were many felicitations to be extended and received. But, once it was all over and the throng without invited to partake of what was left, Ibn was not one of those included. Rather, he was driven off with curses by a servant, and being thus entirely shut out could only wait patiently in the distance until those who had entered should be satisfied and eventually come forth wiping their lips and chewing khat—in better humor, perchance—or go his way. Then, if he chose to stay, and they were kind—

But, having eaten and drunk, they were in no better mood in regard to him. As they came forth, singly or in pairs, an hour or more later, they saw in him only a pest, one who would take from them a little of that which they themselves had earned with difficulty. Therefore they passed him by unheeding or with jests.

And by now it was that time in the afternoon when the effect on the happy possessor of khat throughout all Arabia was only too plainly to be seen. The Arab servant who in the morning had been surly and taciturn under the blazing sun was now, with a wad of the vivifying leaves in his cheek, doing his various errands and duties with a smile and a light foot. The bale which the ordinary coolie of the waterfront could not lift in the morning was now but a featherweight on his back. The coffee merchant who in the morning was acrid in manner and sharp at a bargain, now received your orders gratefully and with a pleasantry, and even a bid for conversation in his eye. Abdullah, the silk merchant, dealing with his customers in sight of the mosque, bestowed compliments and presents. By Allah, he would buy your horse for the price of an elephant and find no favor too great to do for you. Yussuf, the sambuk-carrier, a three-hundred-weight goatskin on his back, and passing Ibn near the mosque once more, assured Ali, his familiar of the same world and of equal load, as they trudged along together, “Cut off my strong hand, and I will become Hadji, the sweeper” (a despised caste), “but take away my khat, and let me die!” Everywhere the evasive, apathetic atmosphere of the morning had given way to the valor of sentient life. Chewing the life-giving weed, all were sure that they could perform prodigies of energy and strength, that life was a delicious thing, the days and years of their troubles as nothing.

But viewing this and having none, and trudging moodily along toward his waiting-place in front of the mosque, Ibn was truly depressed and out of sorts. The world was not right. Age and poverty should command more respect. To be sure, in his youth perhaps he had not been all that he might have been, but still, for that matter, had many others so been? Were not all men weak, after their kind, or greedy or uncharitable? By Allah, they were, and as he had reason to know! Waidi, the water-seller? A thief really, no whit better than himself, if the world but knew. Hussein, the peddler of firewood; Haifa, the tobacco tramp—a wretched and swindling pack, all, not a decent loin- or shoulder-cloth among them, possessed of no better places of abode than his own really, yet all, even as the richest of men, had their khat, could go to their coffee places this night and enjoy it for a few anna. Even they! And he!

In Hodeidah there was still another class, the strictly business or merchant class, who, unlike men of wealth or the keepers of the very small shops, wound up their affairs at four in the afternoon and returning to their homes made a kind of public show of their ease and pleasure in khat from then on until the evening prayers. Charpoys, water-pipes and sweetmeats were brought forth into the shade before the street door. The men of the household and their male friends sprawled sociably on the charpoys, the ingredients for the promotion of goodly fellowship ready to their hands. A graybeard or two might sit among them expounding from the sacred book, or conversation lively in character but subdued in tone entertained the company. Then the aged, the palsied, even the dying of the family, their nearest of kin, were brought down on their beds from the top of the house to partake of this feast of reason and flow of wit. Inside the latticed windows the women sat, munching the second-best leaves and listening to the scraps of wisdom that floated up to them from the company below.

It was from this hour on that Ibn found it most difficult to endure life. To see the world thus gay while he was hungry was all but too much. After noting some of this he wandered wearily down the winding market street which led from the mosque to the waterfront, and where in view of the sea were a few of the lowest coffee-houses, frequented by coolies, bhisties and hadjis. Here in some one of them, though without a single pice in his hand, he proposed to make a final effort before night should fall, so that thereafter in some one of them, the very lowest of course, he himself might sit over the little khat he would (if fortunate) be permitted to purchase, and a little kishr. Perhaps in one of these he would receive largess from one of these lowest of mabraz masters or his patrons, or be permitted to tell an old and hoarse and quavering tale. His voice was indeed wretched.

On his way thence, however, via the Street of the Seven Blessings, he came once more before the door of Al Hajjaj, the cook, busy among his pots and pans, and paused rather disconsolately in the sight of the latter, who recognized him but made no sign.

“Alms, O Hajjaj, in the name of the Prophet, and mayst thou never look about thy shop but that it shall be full of customers and thy profit large!” he voiced humbly.

“Be off! Hast thou no other door than mine before which to pause and moan?”

“Ever generous Hajjaj,” he continued, “’tis true thou hast been kind often, and I deserve nothing more of thee. Yet wilt thou believe me that for days I have had neither food nor drink—nor a leaf of khat—nay, not so much as an wheaten cake, a bowl of curds or even a small cup of kishr. My state is low. That I shall not endure another day I know.”

“And well enough, dog, since thou hast not made more of thy life than thou hast. Other men have affairs and children, but thou nothing. What of all thy years? Hast thou aught to show? Thou knowest by what steps thou hast come so. There are those as poor as thyself who can sing in a coffee-house or tell a tale. But thou—Come, canst thou think of nothing better than begging? Does not Hussein, the beggar, sing? And Ay-eeb tell tales? Come!”

“Do thou but look upon me! Have I the strength? Or a voice? Or a heart for singing? It is true; I have sung in my time, but now my tales are known, and I have not the strength to gather new ones. Yet who would listen?”

The restaurant-keeper eyed him askance. “Must I therefore provide for thee daily? By Allah, I will not! Here is a pice for thee. Be off, and come not soon again! I do not want thee before my door. My customers will not come here if thou dost!”

With slow and halting steps Ibn now took himself off, but little the better for the small gift made him. There was scarcely any place where for a pice, the smallest of coins, he could obtain anything. What, after all, was to be had for it—a cup of kishr? No. A small bowl of curds? No. A sprig of khat? No. And so great was his need, his distress of mind and body, that little less than a good armful of khat, or at least a dozen or more green succulent sprays, to be slowly munched and the juice allowed to sharpen his brain and nerves, would have served to strengthen and rest him. But how to come by so much now? How?

The character of the places frequented by the coolies, bhisties (water-carriers), hadjis and even beggars like Ibn, while without any of the so-called luxuries of these others, and to the frequenters of which the frequenters of these were less than the dust under their feet, were still, to these latter, excellent enough. Yea, despised as they were, they contained charpoys on which each could sit with his little water-chatty beside him, and in the centre of the circle one such as even the lowly Ibn, a beggar, singing his loudest or reciting some tale—for such as they. It was in such places as these, before his voice had wholly deserted him, that Ibn had told his tales. Here, then, for the price of a few anna, they could munch the leavings of the khat market, drink kishr and discuss the state of the world and their respective fortunes. Compared to Ibn in his present state, they were indeed as lords, even princes.

But, by Allah, although having been a carrier and a vendor himself in his day, and although born above them, yet having now no voice nor any tales worth the telling, he was not even now looked upon as one who could stand up and tell of the wonders of the Jinn and demons and the great kings and queens who had reigned of old. Indeed, so low had he fallen that he could not even interest this despised caste. His only gift now was listening, or to make a pathetic picture, or recite the ills that were his.

Nevertheless necessity, a stern master, compelled him to think better of his quondam tale-telling art. Only, being, as he knew, wholly unsuited to recite any tale now, he also knew that the best he could do would be to make the effort, a pretense, in the hope that those present, realizing his age and unfitness, would spare him the spectacle he would make of himself and give him a few anna wherewith to ease himself then and there. Accordingly, the hour having come when the proffered services of a singer or story-teller would be welcomed in any mabraz, he made his way to this region of many of them and where beggars were so common. Only, glancing through the door of the first one, he discovered that there were far too few patrons for his mood. They would be in nowise gay, hence neither kind nor generous as yet, and the keeper would be cold. In a second, a little farther on, a tom-tom was beginning, but the guests were only seven in number and but newly settled in their pleasure. In a third, when the diaphanous sky without was beginning to pale to a deep steel and the evening star was hanging like a solitaire from the pure breast of the western firmament, he pushed aside the veiling cords of beads of one and entered, for here was a large company resting upon their pillows and charpoys, their chatties and hubbuks beside them, but no singer or beater of a tom-tom or teller of tales as yet before them.

“O friends,” he began with some diffidence and imaginings, for well he knew how harsh were the moods and cynical the judgments of some of these lowest of life’s offerings, “be generous and hearken to the tale of one whose life has been long and full of many unfortunate adventures, one who although he is known to you—”

“What!” called Hussein, the peddler of firewood, reclining at his ease in his corner, a spray of all but wilted khat in his hand. “Is it not even Ibn Abdullah? And has he turned tale-teller once more? By Allah, a great teller of tales—one of rare voice! The camels and jackals will be singing in Hodeidah next!”

“An my eyes deceive me not,” cried Waidi, the water-carrier, at his ease also, a cup of kishr in his hands, “this is not Ibn Abdullah, but Sindbad, fresh from a voyage!”

“Or Ali Baba himself,” cried Yussuf, the carrier, hoarsely. “Thou hast a bag of jewels somewhere about thee? Now indeed we shall hear things!”

“And in what a voice!” added Haifa the tobacco-tramp, noting the husky, wheezy tones with which Ibn opened his plea. “This is to be a treat, truly. And now we may rest and have wonders upon wonders. Ibn of Mecca and Jiddah, and even of marvelous Hodeidah itself, will now tell us much. A cup of kishr, ho! This must be listened to!”

But now Bab-al Oman, the keeper, a stout and cumbrous soul, coming forth from his storeroom, gazed upon Ibn with mingled astonishment and no little disfavor, for it was not customary to permit any of his customers of the past to beg in here, and as for a singer or story-teller he had never thought of Ibn in that light these many years. He was too old, without the slightest power to do aught but begin in a wheezy voice.

“Hearken,” he called, coming over and laying a hand on him, the while the audience gazed and grinned, “hast thou either anna or rupee wherewith to fulfill thy account in case thou hast either khat or kishr?” The rags and the mummy-like pallor of the old man offended him.

“Do but let him speak,” insisted Hussein the peddler gaily, “or sing,” for he was already feeling the effects of his ease and the restorative power of the plant. “This will be wonderful. By the voices of eleven hundred elephants!”

“Yea, a story,” called Waidi, “or perhaps that of the good Cadi of Taiz and the sacred waters of Jezer!”

“Or of the Cadi of Mecca and the tobacco that was too pure!”

Ibn heard full well and knew the spectacle he was making of himself. The references were all too plain. Only age and want and a depressing feebleness, which had been growing for days, caused him to forget, or prevented, rather, his generating a natural rage and replying in kind. These wretched enemies of his, dogs lower than himself, had never forgiven him that he had been born out of their caste, or, having been so, that he had permitted himself to sink to labor and beg with them. But now his age and weakness were too great. He was too weary to contend.

“O most generous Oman, best of keepers of a mabraz—and thou, O comfortable and honorable guests,” he insisted wheezily, “I have here but one pice, the reward of all my seekings this day. It is true that I am a beggar and that my coverings are rags, yet do but consider that I am old and feeble. This day and the day before and the day before that—”

“Come, come!” said Oman restlessly and feeling that the custom and trade of his mabraz were being injured, “out! Thou canst not sing and thou canst not tell a tale, as thou well knowest. Why come here when thou hast but a single pice wherewith to pay thy way? Beg more, but not here! Bring but so much as half a rupee, and thou shalt have service in plenty!”

“But the pice I have here—may not I—O good sons of the Prophet, a spray of khat, a cup of kishr—suffer me not thus be cast forth! ‘—and the poor and the son of the road!’ Alms—alms—in the name of Allah!”

“Out, out!” insisted Oman gently but firmly. “So much as ten anna, and thou mayst rest here; not otherwise.”

He turned him forth into the night.

And now, weak and fumbling, Ibn stood there for a time, wondering where else to turn. He was so weak that at last even the zest for search or to satisfy himself was departing. For a moment, a part of his old rage and courage returning, he threw away the pice that had been given him, then turned back, but not along the street of the bazaars. He was too distrait and disconsolate. Rather, by a path which he well knew, he circled now to the south of the town, passing via the Bet-el-Fakin gate to the desert beyond the walls, where, ever since his days as a pack servant with the Bedouins, he had thought to come in such an hour. Overhead were the stars in that glorious æther, lit with a light which never shines on other soils or seas. The evening star had disappeared, but the moon was now in the west, a thin feather, yet transfiguring and transforming as by magic the homely and bare features of the sands. Out here was something of that beauty which as a herdsman among the Bedouins he had known, the scent of camels and of goats’ milk, the memory of low black woolen tents, dotting the lion-tawny sands and gazelle-brown gravels with a warm and human note, and the camp-fire that, like a glowworm, had denoted the village centre. Now, as in a dream, the wild weird songs of the boys and girls of the desert came back, the bleating of their sheep and goats in the gloaming. And the measured chant of the spearsmen, gravely stalking behind their charges, the camels, their song mingling with the bellowing of their humpy herds.

“It is finished,” he said, once he was free of the city and far into the desert itself. “I have no more either the skill nor the strength wherewith to endure or make my way. And without khat one cannot endure. What will be will be, and I am too old. Let them find me so. I shall not move. It is better than the other.”

Then upon the dry, warm sands he laid himself, his head toward Mecca, while overhead the reremouse circled and cried, its tiny shriek acknowledging its zest for life; and the rave of a jackal, resounding through the illuminated shade beyond, bespoke its desire to live also. Most musical of all music, the palm trees now answered the whispers of the night breeze with the softest tones of falling water.

“It is done,” sighed Ibn Abdullah, as he lay and wearily rested. “Worthless I came, O Allah, and worthless I return. It is well.”

VII
TYPHOON

Into a singularly restricted and indifferent environment Ida Zobel was born. Her mother, a severe, prim German woman, died when she was only three, leaving her to the care of her father and his sister, both extremely reserved and orderly persons. Later, after Ida had reached the age of ten, William Zobel took unto himself a second wife, who resembled Zobel and his first wife in their respect for labor and order.

Both were at odds with the brash gayety and looseness of the American world in which they found themselves. Being narrow, sober, workaday Germans, they were annoyed by the groups of restless, seeking, eager, and as Zobel saw it, rather scandalous young men and women who paraded the neighborhood streets of an evening without a single thought apparently other than pleasure. And these young scamps and their girl friends who sped about in automobiles. The loose, indifferent parents. The loose, free ways of all these children. What was to become of such a nation? Were not the daily newspapers, which he would scarcely tolerate in his home longer, full of these wretched doings? The pictures of almost naked women that filled them all! Jazz! Petting parties! High school boys with flasks on their hips! Girls with skirts to their knees, rolled-down stockings, rolled-down neck-bands, bare arms, bobbed hair, no decent concealing underwear!

“What—a daughter of his grow up like that! Be permitted to join in this prancing route to perdition! Never!” And in consequence, the strictest of rules with regard to Ida’s upbringing. Her hair was to grow its natural length, of course. Her lips and cheeks were never to know the blush of false, suggestive paint. Plain dresses. Plain underwear and stockings and shoes and hats. No crazy, idiotic finery, but substantial, respectable clothing. Work at home and, when not otherwise employed with her studies at school, in the small paint and color store which her father owned in the immediate vicinity of their home. And last, but not least, a schooling of such proper and definite character as would serve to keep her mind from the innumerable current follies which were apparently pulling at the foundations of decent society.

For this purpose Zobel chose a private and somewhat religious school conducted by an aged German spinster of the name of Elizabeth Hohstauffer, who had succeeded after years and years of teaching in impressing her merits as a mentor on perhaps as many as a hundred German families of the area. No contact with the careless and shameless public school here. And once the child had been inducted into that, there followed a series of daily inquiries and directions intended to guide her in the path she was to follow.

“Hurry! You have only ten minutes now in which to get to school. There is no time to lose!”... “How comes it that you are five minutes late to-night? What were you doing?”... “Your teacher made you stay? You had to stop and look for a blank book?”... “Why didn’t you come home first and let me look for it with you afterwards?” (It was her stepmother talking.) “You know your father doesn’t want you to stay after school.”... “And just what were you doing on Warren Avenue between twelve and one to-day? Your father said you were with some girl.”... “Vilma Balet? And who is Vilma Balet? Where does she live? And how long has it been that you have been going with her? Why is it that you have not mentioned her before? You know what your father’s rule is. And now I shall have to tell him. He will be angry. You must obey his rules. You are by no means old enough to decide for yourself. You have heard him say that.”

Notwithstanding all this, Ida, though none too daring or aggressive mentally, was being imaginatively drawn to the very gayeties and pleasures that require courage and daring. She lived in a mental world made up of the bright lights of Warren Avenue, of which she caught an occasional glimpse. The numerous cars speeding by! The movies and her favorite photographs of actors and actresses, some of the mannerisms of whom the girls imitated at school. The voices, the laughter of the boys and girls as they walked to and fro along the commonplace thoroughfare with its street-cars and endless stores side by side! And what triumphs or prospective joys they planned and palavered over as they strolled along in their easy manner—arms linked and bodies swaying—up the street and around the corner and back into the main street again, gazing at their graceful ankles and bodies in the mirrors and windows as they passed, or casting shy glances at the boys.

But as for Ida—despite her budding sensitivity—at ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen—there was no escape from the severe regimen she was compelled to follow. Breakfast at seven-thirty sharp because the store had to be opened by her father at eight; luncheon at twelve-thirty, on the dot to satisfy her father; dinner invariably at six-thirty, because there were many things commercial and social which fell upon the shoulders of William Zobel at night. And between whiles, from four to six on weekdays and later from seven to ten at night, as well as all day Saturdays, store duty in her father’s store. No parties, no welcome home atmosphere for the friends of her choice. Those she really liked were always picked to pieces by her stepmother, and of course this somewhat influenced the opinion of her father. It was common gossip of the neighborhood that her parents were very strict and that they permitted her scarcely any liberties. A trip to a movie, the choice of which was properly supervised by her parents; an occasional ride in an automobile with her parents, since by the time she had attained her fifteenth year he had purchased one of the cheaper cars.

But all the time the rout of youthful life before her eyes. And in so far as her home life and the emotional significance of her parents were concerned, a sort of depressing grayness. For William Zobel, with his gray-blue eyes gleaming behind gilt-rimmed glasses, was scarcely the person to whom a girl of Ida’s temperament would be drawn. Nor was her stepmother, with her long, narrow face, brown eyes and black hair. Indeed, Zobel was a father who by the very solemnity of his demeanor, as well as the soberness and practicability of his thoughts and rules, was constantly evoking a sense of dictatorship which was by no means conducive to sympathetic approach. To be sure, there were greetings, acknowledgments, respectful and careful explanations as to this, that and the other. Occasionally they would go to a friend’s house or a public restaurant, but there existed no understanding on the part of either Zobel or his wife—he never having wanted a daughter of his own and she not being particularly drawn to the child of another—of the growing problems of adolescence that might be confronting her, and hence none of that possible harmony and enlightenment which might have endeared each to the other.

Instead, repression, and even fear at times, which in the course of years took on an aspect of careful courtesy supplemented by accurate obedience. But within herself a growing sense of her own increasing charm, which, in her father’s eyes, if not in her stepmother’s, seemed to be identified always with danger—either present or prospective. Her very light and silky hair—light, grayish-blue eyes—a rounded and intriguing figure which even the other girls at Miss Hohstauffer’s school noticed and commented on. And in addition a small straight nose and a full and yet small and almost pouting mouth and rounded chin. Had she not a mirror and were there not boys from her seventh year on who looked at her and sought to attract her attention? Her father could see this as well as his second wife. But she dared not loiter here and there as others did, for those vigorous, bantering, seeking, intriguing contacts. She must hurry home—to store or house duty or more study in such fields as Zobel and his wife thought best for her. If it was to run errands she was always timed to the minute.

And yet, in spite of all these precautions, the swift telegraphy of eyes and blood. The haunting, seeking moods of youth, which speaks a language of its own. In the drugstore at the corner of Warren and Tracy, but a half-block from her home, there was at one time in her twelfth year Lawrence Sullivan, a soda clerk. He seemed to her the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The dark, smooth hair lying glossed and parted above a perfect white forehead; slim, graceful hands—or so she thought—a care and smartness in the matter of dress which even the clothing of the scores of public school boys passing this way seemed scarcely to match. And such a way where girls were concerned—so smiling and at his ease. And always a word for them as they stopped in on their way home from school.

“Why, hello, Della! How’s Miss McGinnis to-day? I bet I know what you’re going to have. I think pretty blonde girls must like chocolate sundaes—they contrast with their complexions.” And then smiling serenely while Miss McGinnis panted and smiled: “A lot you know about what blonde girls like.”

And Ida Zobel, present on occasion by permission for a soda or a sundae, looking on and listening most eagerly. Such a handsome youth. All of sixteen. He would as yet pay no attention to so young a girl as she, of course, but when she was older! Would she be as pretty as this Miss McGinnis? Could she be as assured? How wonderful to be attractive to such a youth! And what would he say to her, if he said anything at all? And what would she say in return? Many times she imitated these girls mentally and held imaginary conversations with herself. Yes, despite this passive admiration, Mr. Sullivan went the way of all soda-clerks, changing eventually to another job in another neighborhood.

But in the course of time there were others who took her eye and for a time held her mind—around whose differing charms she erected fancies which had nothing to do with reality. One of these was Merton Webster, the brisk, showy, vain and none too ambitious son of a local state senator, who lived in the same block she did and attended Watkins High School, which she was not permitted to attend. So handsome was he—so debonair. “Hello, kid! Gee, you look cute, all right. One of these days I’ll take you to a dance if you want to go.” Yet, because of her years and the strict family espionage, blushes, her head down, but a smile none the less.

And she was troubled by thoughts of him until Walter Stour, whose father conducted a realty and insurance business only a little way west of her father’s store, took her attention—a year later. Walter was a tall, fair complexioned youth, with gay eyes and a big, laughing mouth, who, occasionally with Merton Webster, Lawrence Cross, a grocer’s son, Sven Volberg, the dry-cleaner’s son, and some others, hung about the favorite moving-picture theatre or the drugstore on the main corner and flirted with the girls as they passed by. As restricted as she was still, because of her trips to and fro between home and school and her service as a clerk in her father’s store, she was not unfamiliar with these several figures or their names. They came into the store occasionally and even commented on her looks: “Oh, getting to be a pretty girl, isn’t she?” Whereupon she would flush with excitement and nervously busy herself about filling a customer’s order.

It was through Etelka Shomel, the daughter of a German neighbor who was also a friend of William Zobel, that she learned much of these boys and girls. Her father thought Etelka a safe character for Ida to chum with, chiefly on account of her unattractiveness. But through her, as well as their joint pilgrimages here and there, she came to hear much gossip about the doings of these same. Walter Stour, whom she now greatly admired, was going with a girl by the name of Edna Strong, who was the daughter of a milk-dealer. Stour’s father was not as stingy as some fathers. He had a good car and occasionally let his son use it. Stour often took Edna and some of her friends to boathouse resorts on the Little Shark River. A girl friend of Etelka’s told her what a wonderful mimic and dancer he was. She had been on a party with him. And, of course, Ida lent a willing and eager ear to all this. Oh, the gayety of such a life! Its wonders! Beauties!

And then one night, as Ida was coming around the corner to go to her father’s store at about seven-thirty and Stour was on his favorite corner with several other boys, he called: “I know who’s a sweet kid, but her daddy won’t let her look at a guy. Will he?” This last aimed directly at her as she passed, while she, knowing full well who was meant and how true it was, hurried on all the faster. If her father had heard that! Oh, my! But it thrilled her as she walked. “Sweet kid.” “Sweet kid”—kept ringing in her ears.

And then at last, in her sixteenth year, Edward Hauptwanger moved into a large house in Grey Street. His father, Jacob Hauptwanger, was a well-to-do coal-dealer who had recently purchased a yard on the Absecon. It was about this time that Ida became keenly aware that her normal girlhood, with its so necessary social contacts, was being set at naught and that she was being completely frustrated by the stern and repressive attitude of her father and stepmother. The wonder and pain, for instance, of spring and summer evenings just then, when she would stand gazing at the moon above her own commonplace home—shining down into the narrow, commonplace garden at the back, where still were tulips, hyacinths, honeysuckle and roses. And the stars shining above Warren Avenue, where were the cars, the crowds, the moving-picture theatres and restaurants which held such charm for her. There was a kind of madness, an ache, in it all. Oh, for pleasure—pleasure! To go, run, dance, play, kiss with some one—almost any one, really, if he were only young and handsome. Was she going to know no one—no one? And, worse, the young men of the neighborhood calling to her as she passed: “Oh, look who’s here! Shame her daddy won’t let her out.” “Why don’t you bob your hair, Ida? You’d be cute.” Even though she was out of school now, she was clerking as before and dressing as before. No short skirts, bobbed hair, rolled-down stockings, rouge.

But with the arrival of this Edward Hauptwanger, there came a change. For here was a youth of definite and drastic impulses—a beau, a fighter, a fellow of infinite guile where girls of all sorts were concerned—and, too, a youth of taste in the matter of dress and manner—one who stood out as a kind of hero to the type of youthful male companions with whom he chose to associate. Did he not live in a really large, separate house on Grey Street? And were not his father’s coal-pockets and trucks conspicuously labelled outstanding features of the district? And, in addition, Hauptwanger, owing to the foolish and doting favor of his mother (by no means shared by his father), always supplied with pocket money sufficient to meet all required expenditures of such a world as this. The shows to which he could take his “flames”; the restaurants, downtown as well as here. And the boat club on the Little Shark which at once became a rendezvous of his. He had a canoe of his own, so it was said. He was an expert swimmer and diver. He was allowed the use of his father’s car and would often gather up his friends on a Saturday or Sunday and go to the boat club.

More interesting still, after nearly a year’s residence here, in which he had had time to establish himself socially after this fashion, he had his first sight of Ida Zobel passing one evening from her home to the store. Her youthful if repressed beauty was at its zenith. And some remarks concerning her and her restricted life by youths who had neither the skill nor the daring to invade it at once set him thinking. She was beautiful, you bet! Hauptwanger, because of a certain adventurous fighting strain in his blood, was at once intrigued by the difficulties which thus so definitely set this girl apart. “These old-fashioned, dictatorial Germans! And not a fellow in the neighborhood to step up and do anything about it! Well, whaddya know?”

And forthwith an intensive study of the situation as well as of the sensitive, alluring Ida Zobel. And with the result that he was soon finding himself irresistibly attracted to her. That pretty face! That graceful, rounded figure! Those large, blue-gray, shy and evasive eyes! Yet with yearning in them, too.

And in consequence various brazen parades past the very paint store of Zobel, with the fair Ida within. And this despite the fact that Zobel himself was there—morning, noon and night—bent over his cash register or his books or doing up something for a customer. And Ida, by reason of her repressed desires and sudden strong consciousness of his interest in her as thus expressed, more and more attracted to him. And he, because of this or his own interest, coming to note the hours when she was most likely to be alone. These were, as a rule, Wednesdays and Fridays, when because of a singing society as well as a German social and commercial club her father was absent from eight-thirty on. And although occasionally assisted by her stepmother she was there alone on these nights.

And so a campaign which was to break the spell which held the sleeping beauty. At first, however, only a smile in the direction of Ida whenever he passed or she passed him, together with boasts to his friends to the effect that he would “win that kid yet, wait and see.” And then, one evening, in the absence of Zobel, a visit to the store. She was behind the counter and between the business of waiting on customers was dreaming as usual of the life outside. For during the past few weeks she had become most sharply conscious of the smiling interest of Hauptwanger. His straight, lithe body—his quick, aggressive manner—his assertive, seeking eyes! Oh, my! Like the others who had gone before him and who had attracted her emotional interest, he was exactly of that fastidious, self-assured and self-admiring type toward which one so shy as herself would yearn. No hesitancy on his part. Even for this occasion he had scarcely troubled to think of a story. What difference? Any old story would do. He wanted to see some paints. They might be going to repaint the house soon—and in the meantime he could engage her in conversation, and if the “old man” came back, well, he would talk paints to him.

And so, on this particularly warm and enticing night in May, he walked briskly in, a new gray suit, light tan fedora hat and tan shoes and tie completing an ensemble which won the admiration of the neighborhood. “Oh, hello. Pretty tough to have to work inside on a night like this, ain’t it?” (A most irresistible smile going with this.) “I want to see some paints—the colors of ’em, I mean. The old man is thinking of repainting the house.”

And at once Ida, excited and flushing to the roots of her hair, turning to look for a color card—as much to conceal her flushing face as anything else. And yet intrigued as much as she was affrighted. The daring of him! Suppose her father should return—or her stepmother enter? Still, wasn’t he as much of a customer as any one else—although she well knew by his manner that it was not paint that had brought him. For over the way, as she herself could and did see, were three of his admiring companions ranged in a row to watch him, the while he leaned genially and familiarly against the counter and continued: “Gee, I’ve seen you often enough, going back and forth between your school and this store and your home. I’ve been around here nearly a year now, but I’ve never seen you around much with the rest of the girls. Too bad! Otherwise we mighta met. I’ve met all the rest of ’em so far,” and at the same time by troubling to touch his tie he managed to bring into action one hand on which was an opal ring, his wrist smartly framed in a striped pink cuff. “I heard your father wouldn’t even let you go to Warren High. Pretty strict, eh?” And he beamed into the blue-gray eyes of the budding girl before him, noted the rounded pink cheeks, the full mouth, the silky hair, the while she trembled and thrilled.

“Yes, he is pretty strict.”

“Still, you can’t just go nowhere all the time, can you?” And by now the color card, taken into his own hand, was lying flat on the counter. “You gotta have a little fun once in a while, eh? If I’da thought you’da stood for it, I’da introduced myself before this. My father has the big coal-dock down here on the river. He knows your father, I’m sure. I gotta car, or at least my dad has, and that’s as good as mine. Do you think your father’d letcha take a run out in the country some Saturday or Sunday—down to Little Shark River, say, or Peck’s Beach? Lots of the fellows and girls from around here go down there.”

By now it was obvious that Hauptwanger was achieving a conquest of sorts and his companions over the way were abandoning their advantageous position, no longer hopefully interested by the possibility of defeat. But the nervous Ida, intrigued though terrified, was thinking how wonderful it was to at last interest so handsome a youth as this. Even though her father might not approve, still might not all that be overcome by such a gallant as this? But her hair was not bobbed, her skirts not short, her lips not rouged. Could it really be that he was attracted by her physical charms? His dark brown and yet hard and eager eyes—his handsome hands. The smart way in which he dressed. She was becoming conscious of her severely plain blue dress with white trimmings, her unmodish slippers and stockings. At the same time she found herself most definitely replying: “Oh, now, I couldn’t ever do anything like that, you know. You see, my father doesn’t know you. He wouldn’t let me go with any one he doesn’t know or to whom I haven’t been properly introduced. You know how it is.”

“Well, couldn’t I introduce myself then? My father knows your father, I’m sure. I could just tell him that I want to call on you, couldn’t I? I’m not afraid of him, and there’s sure no harm in that, is there?”

“Well, that might be all right, only he’s very strict—and he might not want me to go, anyhow.”

“Oh, pshaw! But you would like to go, wouldn’t you? Or to a picture show? He couldn’t kick against that, could he?”

He looked her in the eye, smiling, and in doing so drew the lids of his own eyes together in a sensuous, intriguing way which he had found effective with others. And in the budding Ida were born impulses of which she had no consciousness and over which she had no control. She merely looked at him weakly. The wonder of him! The beauty of love! Her desire toward him! And so finding heart to say: “No, maybe not. I don’t know. You see I’ve never had a beau yet.”

She looked at him in such a way as to convince him of his conquest. “Easy! A cinch!” was his thought. “Nothing to it at all.” He would see Zobel and get his permission or meet her clandestinely. Gee, a father like that had no right to keep his daughter from having any fun at all. These narrow, hard-boiled German parents—they ought to be shown—awakened—made to come to life.

And so, within two days brazenly presenting himself to Zobel in his store in order to test whether he could not induce him to accept him as presumably at least a candidate for his daughter’s favor. Supposing the affair did not prove as appealing as he thought, he could drop the contact, couldn’t he? Hadn’t he dropped others? Zobel knew of his father, of course. And while listening to Hauptwanger’s brisk and confident explanation he was quite consciously evaluating the smart suit, new tan shoes and gathering, all in all, a favorable impression.

“You say you spoke to her already?”

“I asked her if I might call on her, yes, sir.”

“Uh-uh! When was this?”

“Just two days ago. In the evening here.”

“Uh-uh!”

At the same time a certain nervous, critical attitude toward everything, which had produced many fine lines about the eyes and above the nose of Mr. Zobel, again taking hold of him: “Well, well—this is something I will have to talk over with my daughter. I must see about this. I am very careful of my daughter and who she goes with, you know.” Nevertheless, he was thinking of the many coal trucks delivering coal in the neighborhood, the German name of this youth and his probable German and hence conservative upbringing. “I will let you know about it later. You come in some other time.”

And so later a conference with his daughter, resulting finally in the conclusion that it might be advisable for her to have at least one male contact. For she was sixteen years old and up to the present time he had been pretty strict with her. Perhaps she was over the worst period. At any rate, most other girls of her age were permitted to go out some. At least one beau of the right kind might be essential, and somehow he liked this youth who had approached him in this frank, fearless manner.

And so, for the time being, a call permitted once or twice a week, with Hauptwanger from the first dreaming most daring and aggressive dreams. And after a time, having conducted himself most circumspectly, it followed that an evening at one of the neighborhood picture houses was suggested and achieved. And once this was accomplished it became a regularity for him to spend either Wednesday or Friday evening with Ida, it depending on her work in the store. Later, his courage and skill never deserting him, a suggestion to Mr. Zobel that he permit Ida to go out with him on a Saturday afternoon to visit Peck’s Beach nine miles below the city, on the Little Shark. It was very nice there, and a popular Saturday and Sunday resort for most of the residents of this area. After a time, having by degrees gained the complete confidence of Zobel, he was granted permission to take Ida to one or another of the theatres downtown, or to a restaurant, or to the house of a boy friend who had a sister and who lived in the next block.

Despite his stern, infiltrating supervision, Zobel could not prevent the progressive familiarities based on youth, desire, romance. For with Edward Hauptwanger, to contact was to intrigue and eventually demand and compel. And so by degrees hand pressures, stolen or enforced kisses. Yet, none the less, Ida, still fully dominated by the mood and conviction of her father, persisting in a nervous evasiveness which was all too trying to her lover.

“Ah, you don’t know my father. No, I couldn’t do that. No, I can’t stay out so late. Oh, no—I wouldn’t dare go there—I wouldn’t dare to. I don’t know what he would do to me.”

This, or such as this, to all of his overtures which hinted at later hours, a trip to that mysterious and fascinating boat club on the Little Shark twenty-five miles out, where, as he so glibly explained, were to be enjoyed dancing, swimming, boating, music, feasting. But as Ida who had never done any of these things soon discovered for herself, this would require an unheard-of period of time—from noon until midnight—or later Saturday, whereas her father had fixed the hour of eleven-thirty for her return to the parental roof.

“Ah, don’t you want to have any fun at all? Gee! He don’t want you to do a thing and you let him get away with it. Look at all the other girls and fellows around here. There’s not one that’s as scary as you are. Besides, what harm is there? Supposing we don’t get back on time? Couldn’t we say the car broke down? He couldn’t say anything to that. Besides, no one punches a time clock any more.” But Ida nervous and still resisting, and Hauptwanger, because of this very resistance, determined to win her to his mood and to outwit her father at the same time.

And then the lure of summer nights—Corybantic—dithyrambic—with kisses, kisses, kisses—under the shadow of the trees in King Lake Park, or in one of the little boats of its lake which nosed the roots of those same trees on the shore. And with the sensitive and sensual, and yet restricted and inexperienced Ida, growing more and more lost in the spell which youth, summer, love, had generated. The beauty of the face of this, her grand cavalier! His clothes, his brisk, athletic energy and daring! And with him perpetually twittering of this and that, here and there, that if she only truly loved him and had the nerve, what wouldn’t they do? All the pleasures of the world before them, really. And then at last, on this same lake—with her lying in his arms—himself attempting familiarities which scarcely seemed possible in her dreams before this, and which caused her to jump up and demand to be put ashore, the while he merely laughed.

“Oh, what had he done that was so terrible? Say, did she really care for him? Didn’t she? Then, why so uppish? Why cry? Oh, gee, this was a scream, this was. Oh, all right, if that was the way she was going to feel about it.” And once ashore, walking briskly off in the gayest and most self-sufficient manner while she, alone and tortured by her sudden ejection from paradise, slipped home and into her room, there to bury her face in her pillow and to whisper to it and herself of the danger—almost the horror—that had befallen her. Yet in her eyes and mind the while the perfect Hauptwanger. And in her heart his face, hands, hair. His daring. His kisses. And so brooding even here and now as to the wisdom of her course—her anger—and in a dreary and hopeless mood even, dragging herself to her father’s store the next day, merely to wait and dream that he was not as evil as he had seemed—that he could not have seriously contemplated the familiarities that he had attempted; that he had been merely obsessed, bewitched, as she herself had been.

Oh, love, love! Edward! Edward! Edward! Oh, he would not, could not remain away. She must see him—give him a chance to explain. She must make him understand that it was not want of love but fear of life—her father, everything, everybody—that kept her so sensitive, aloof, remote.

And Hauptwanger himself, for all of his bravado and craft, now nervous lest he had been too hasty. For, after all, what a beauty! The lure! He couldn’t let her go this way. It was a little too delicious and wonderful to have her so infatuated—and with a little more attention, who knew? And so conspicuously placing himself where she must pass on her way home in the evening, at the corner of Warren and High—yet with no sign on his part of seeing her. And Ida, with yearning and white-faced misery, seeing him as she passed. Monday night! Tuesday night! And worse, to see him pass the store early Wednesday evening without so much as turning his head. And then the next day a note handed the negro errand boy of her father’s store to be given to him later, about seven, at the corner where he would most surely be.

And then later, with the same Edward taking it most casually and grandly and reading it. So she had been compelled to write him, had she? Oh, these dames! Yet with a definite thrill from the contents for all of that, for it read: “Oh, Edward, darling, you can’t be so cruel to me. How can you? I love you so. You didn’t mean what you said. Tell me you didn’t. I didn’t. Oh, please come to the house at eight. I want to see you.”

And Edward Hauptwanger, quite triumphant now, saying to the messenger before four cronies who knew of his present pursuit of Ida: “Oh, that’s all right. Just tell her I’ll be over after a while.” And then as eight o’clock neared, ambling off in the direction of the Zobel home. And as he left one of his companions remarking: “Say, whaddya know? He’s got that Zobel girl on the run now. She’s writing him notes now. Didn’t ya see the coon bring it up? Don’t it beat hell?” And the others as enviously, amazedly and contemptuously inquiring: “Whaddya know?”

And so, under June trees in King Lake Park, once more another conference. “Oh, darling, how could you treat me so, how could you? Oh, my dear, dear darling.” And he replying—“Oh, sure, sure, it was all right, only what do you think I’m made of? Say, have a heart, I’m human, ain’t I? I’ve got some feelings same as anybody else. Ain’t I crazy about you and ain’t you crazy about me? Well, then—besides—well, say....” A long pharisaical and deluding argument as one might guess, with all the miseries and difficulties of restrained and evaded desire most artfully suggested—yet with no harm meant, of course. Oh, no.

But again, on her part, the old foolish, terrorized love plea. And the firm assurance on his part that if anything went wrong—why, of course. But why worry about that now? Gee, she was the only girl he knew who worried about anything like that. And finally a rendezvous at Little Shark River, with his father’s car as the conveyance. And later others and others. And she—because of her weak, fearsome yielding in the first instance—and then her terrorized contemplation of possible consequences in the second—clinging to him in all too eager and hence cloying fashion. She was his now—all his. Oh, he would never, never desert her, now, would he?

But he, once satisfied—his restless and overweening ego comforted by another victory—turning with a hectic and chronic, and for him uncontrollable sense of satiety, as well as fear of complications and burden—to other phases of beauty—other fields and relationships where there was no such danger. For after all—one more girl. One more experience. And not so greatly different from others that had gone before it. And this in the face of the magic of her meaning before capitulation. He did not understand it. He could not. He did not even trouble to think about it much. But so it was. And with no present consciousness or fear of being involved in any early and unsatisfactory complications which might require marriage—on the contrary a distinct and definite opposition to any such complication at any time, anywhere.

Yet, at last, after many, many perfect hours throughout July and August, the fatal complaint. There was something wrong, she feared. She had such strange moods—such strange spells, pains, fears—recently. Could there be? Did he think there could be any danger? She had done what he said. Oh, if there was! What was she to do then? Would he marry her? He must, really, then. There was no other way. Her father—his fierce anger. Her own terrors. She could not live at home any more. Could they not—would they not—be married now if anything were wrong? He had said he would if anything like this ever happened, had he not?

And Hauptwanger, in the face of this, suffering a nervous and cold reaction. Marriage! The mere thought of such a thing! Impossible! His father! His hitherto free roving life! His future! Besides, how did she know? How could she be sure? And supposing she was! Other girls got out of such things without much trouble. Why not she? And had he not taken all the usual customary and necessary precautions that he knew! She was too easily frightened—too uninformed—not daring enough. He knew of lots of cases where girls got through situations of this kind with ease. He would see about something first.

But conjoined with this, as she herself could see and feel, a sudden definite coolness never before sensed or witnessed by her, which was based on his firm determination not to pursue this threatening relationship any longer, seeing that to do so meant only to emphasize responsibility. And in addition, a keen desire to stay away. Were there not other girls? A whole world full. And only recently had he not been intrigued by one who was more aware of the free, smart ways of pleasure and not so likely ever to prove a burden?

But on the other hand, in the face of a father as strict as Zobel himself and a mother who believed in his goodness, his course was not absolutely clear either. And so from this hour on an attempt to extricate himself as speedily and as gracefully as possible from this threatening position. But before this a serious, if irritated, effort on his part to find a remedy among his friends of the boating club and street corners. But with the result merely of a vivid advertisement of the fact that this gay and successful adventure of his had now resulted most unsuccessfully for Ida. And thereafter hints and nods and nudges among themselves whenever she chanced to pass. And Ida, because of fear of scandal, staying in as much as she could these days, or when she did appear trying to avoid Warren Avenue at High as much as possible. For by now she was truly terrified, seized indeed with the most weakening emotions based on the stern and unrelenting countenance of her father which loomed so threateningly beyond the immediate future. “If me no ifs,” and “but me no buts.” Oh, how to do? For throughout the trial of this useless remedy, there had been nothing to do but wait. And the waiting ended in nothing—only greater horrors. And between all this, and enforced work at the store and enforced duties at home, efforts to see her beloved—who, because of new and more urgent duties, was finding it harder and harder to meet her anywhere or at any time.

“But you must see how it is with me, don’t you, dear? I can’t go on like this, can’t you see that? You said you’d marry me, didn’t you? And look at all the time that’s gone already. Oh, I’m almost mad. You must do something. You must! You must! If father should find out, what in the world would I do? What would he do to me, and to you, too? Can’t you see how bad it is?”

Yet in the face of this tortured plea on the part of this frantic and still love-sick girl, a calm on the part of Hauptwanger that expressed not indifference but cruelty. She be damned! He would not. He could not. He must save himself now at whatever cost. And so a determined attempt not to see her any more at all—never to speak to her openly anywhere—or to admit any responsibility as to all this. Yet, because of her inexperience, youth and faith thus far, no willingness on her part to believe this. It could not be. She had not even so much as sensed it before. Yet his continuing indifference which could only be interpreted one way. The absences—the excuses! And then one day, when pains and terror seized on her and thereby drove her to him, he looking her calmly and brazenly in the eye and announcing: “But I didn’t really promise to marry you, and you know I didn’t. Besides, I’m not to blame any more than you are. You don’t suppose that just because you don’t know how to take care of yourself I’ve got to marry you now, do you?”

His eyes now for the first time were truly hard. His intention to end this by one fell blow was very definite. And the blow was sufficient at the moment to half unseat the romantic and all but febrile reason of this girl, who up to this hour had believed so foolishly in love. Why, how could this be? The horror of it! The implied disaster. And then half in understanding, half in befuddled unreason, exclaiming: “But, Ed! Ed! You can’t mean that. Why, it isn’t true! You know it isn’t! You promised. You swore. You know I never wanted to—until you made me. Why ... oh, what’ll I do now? My father! I don’t know what he’ll do to me or to you either. Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” And frantically, and without sufficient balance to warrant the name of reason, beginning to wring her hands and twist and sway in a kind of physical as well as mental agony.

At this Hauptwanger, more determined than ever to frighten her away from him once and for all, if possible, exclaiming: “Oh, cut that stuff! I never said I’d marry you, and you know it!” and turning on his heel and leaving her to rejoin the chattering group of youths on the corner, with whom, before her arrival, he had been talking. And as much to sustain himself in this fatal decision as well as to carry it off before them all, adding: “Gee, these skirts! It does beat hell, don’t it?”

Yet now a little fearsome, if vain and contemptuous, for the situation was beginning to take on a gloomy look. But just the same when Johnny Martin, one of his companions and another aspirant for street corner and Lothario honors, remarked: “I saw her here last night lookin’ for you, Ed. Better look out. One of these skirts is likely to do somepin to you one of these days”—he calmly extracted a cigarette from a silver cigarette case and without a look in the direction of the half-swooning Ida, said: “Is that so? Well, maybe. We’ll see first.” And then with a nonchalant nod in the direction of Ida, who, too tortured to even retreat, was standing quite still, exclaimed: “Gee, these Germans! She’s got an old man that wouldn’t ever let her find out anything and now because she thinks there’s something wrong with her she blames me.” And just then, another intimate approaching, and with news of two girls who were to meet them somewhere later, exclaiming: “Hello, Skate! Everything set? All right, then. We might as well go along. S’long, fellas.” And stepping briskly and vigorously away.

But the stricken and shaken Ida still loitered under the already partially denuded September trees. And with the speeding street and auto cars with their horns and bells and the chattering voices and shuffling feet of pedestrians and the blazing evening lights making a kind of fanfare of color and sound. Was it cold? Or was it only herself who was numb and cold? He would not marry her! He had never said he would! How could he say that now? And her father to deal with—and her physical condition to be considered!

As she stood there without moving, there flashed before her a complete panorama of all the paths and benches of King Lake Park—the little boats that slipped here and there under the trees at night in the summertime—a boy and a girl—a boy and a girl—a boy and a girl—to each boat. And the oars dragging most inconsequentially—and infatuated heads together—infatuated hearts beating ecstatically—suffocatingly strong. Yet now—after so many kisses and promises, the lie given to her dreams, her words—his words on which her words had been based—the lie given to kisses—hours, days, weeks, months of unspeakable bliss—the lie given to her own security and hopes, forever. Oh, it would be best to die—it would—it would.

And then a slow and dragging return to her room, where because of the absence of her father and stepmother she managed to slip into her bed and lie there, thinking. But with a kind of fever, alternating with chills—and both shot through with most menacing pains due to this most astounding revelation. And with a sudden and keener volume of resentment than she had ever known gathering in her brain. The cruelty! The cruelty! And the falsehood! He had not only lied but insulted her as well. He who only five months before had sought her so eagerly with his eyes and intriguing smile. The liar! The brute! The monster! Yet linked and interwoven with such thoughts as these, a lacerating desire not to believe them—to turn back a month—two—three—to find in his eyes somewhere a trace of something that would gainsay it all. Oh, Ed! Ed!

And so the night going—and the dawn coming. A horrible lacerating day. And after that other days. And with no one to talk to—no one. If only she could tell her stepmother all. And so other days and nights—all alone. And with blazing, searing, whirling, disordered thoughts in unbroken procession stalking her like demons. The outside world in case she were to be thrust into it! Her own unfamiliarity and hence fear of it! Those chattering, gaping youths on the corners—the girls she knew—their thoughts, since they must all soon know. Her loneliness without love. These and a hundred related thoughts dancing a fantastic, macabre mental dance before her.

But even so, within her own brain the persistent and growing illusion that all she had heard from him was not true—a chimera—and so for the time being at least continued faith in the value of pleading. Her wonderful lover. It must be that still some understanding could be reached. Yet with growing evidence that by no plea or plaint was he to be restored to his former attitude. For, in answer to notes, waiting at the corners, at the end of the street which led down to his father’s coal-dock, in the vicinity of his home—silence, evasions, or direct insults, and sneers, even.

“What’s the big idea, following me around, anyhow? You think I haven’t anything else to do but listen to you? Say, I told you in the first place I couldn’t marry, didn’t I? And now because you think there’s something wrong with you, you want to make me responsible. Well, I’m not the only fellow in this neighborhood. And everybody knows that.”

He paused there, because as he saw this last declaration had awakened in her a latent strength and determination never previously shown in any way. The horror of that to her, as he could see. The whiteness of her face afterwards and on the instant. The blazing electric points within the pupils of her eyes. “That’s a lie, and you know it! It’s not true! Oh, how terrible! And for you to say that to me! I see it all now. You’re just a sneak and a coward. You were just fooling with me all the time, then! You never intended to marry me, and now because you’re afraid you think you can get out of it that way—by trying to blame it on some one else. You coward! Oh, aren’t you the small one, though! And after all the things you said to me—the promises! As though I even thought of any one else in my life! You dare to say that to me, when you know so well!”

Her face was still lily white. And her hands. Her eyes flashed with transcendent and yet helpless and defeated misery. And yet, despite her rage—in the center of this very misery—love itself—strong, vital, burning love—the very core of it. But so tortured that already it was beginning to drive the tears to her eyes.

And he knowing so thoroughly that this love was still there, now instantly seizing on these latest truthful words of hers as an insult—something on which to base an assumed grievance.

“Is that so? A coward, eh? Well, let’s see what you draw down for that, you little dumb-bell.” And so turning on his heel—the strongest instinct in him—his own social salvation in this immediate petty neighborhood at the present time uppermost in his mind. And without a look behind.

But Ida, her fear and terror at its height, calling: “Ed! Ed! You come back here! Don’t you dare to leave me like this! I won’t stand for it. I tell you, I won’t! You come back here now! Do you hear me?” And seeing that he continued on briskly and indifferently, running after him, unbelievably tense and a little beside herself—almost mentally unaccountable for the moment. And he, seeing her thus and amazed and troubled by this new turn his problem had taken, turning abruptly with: “Say! You cut out o’ this now before I do something to you, do you hear? I’m not the one to let you pull this stuff on me. You got yourself into this and now you can get yourself out of it. Beat it before I do something to you, do you hear?” And now he drew nearer—and with such a threatening and savage look in his eyes that for the first time in all her contact with him Ida grew fearful of him. That angry, sullen face. Those fierce, cruel, savage eyes. Was it really true that in addition to all the rest he would really do her physical harm? Then she had not understood him at all, ever. And so pausing and standing quite still, that same fear of physical force that had kept her in subjection to her father overawing her here. At the same time, Hauptwanger, noting the effect of his glowering rage, now added: “Don’t come near me any more, do you hear? If you do, you’re goin’ to get something you’re not going to like. I’m through, and I’m through for good, see.”

Once more he turned and strode away, this time toward the central business district of the High and Warren Avenue region—the while Ida, too shaken by this newest development to quite grasp the full measure of her own necessity or courage, stood there. The horror of it! The disgrace! The shame! For now, surely, tragedy was upon her!

For the time being, in order to save herself from too much publicity, she began to move on—walk—only slowly and with whirling, staggering thoughts that caused her to all but lurch. And so, shaking and pale, she made her way once more to her home, where she stole into her room unnoticed. Yet, now, too tortured to cry but thinking grimly—fiercely at moments—at other times most weakly and feebly even—on all that had so recently occurred.

Her father! Her stepmother! If he—she—they should come to know! But no—something else must happen before ever that should be allowed to happen. She must leave—or—or, better yet—maybe drown herself—make way with herself in some way—or—

In the garret of this home, to which as a child on certain days she had frequently resorted to play, was an old wire clothes-line on which was hung an occasional wash. And now—might not that—in the face of absolute fiasco here—might not that—she had read of ending one’s life in that manner. And it was so unlikely that any one would trouble to look there—until—until—well—

But would she? Could she? This strange budding of life that she sensed—feared. Was it fair to it? Herself? To life that had given it to her? And when she desired so to live? And when he owed her something—at least help to her and her—her—her—No, she could not—would not think of that yet, especially when to die this way would be but to clear the way to easier and happier conquests for him. Never! Never! She would kill him first—and then herself. Or expose him and so herself—and then—and then—

But again her father! Her stepmother! The disgrace! And so—

In her father’s desk at the store was a revolver—a large, firm, squarish mechanism which, as she had heard him say, fired eight shots. It was so heavy, so blue, so cold. She had seen it, touched it, lifted it once—but with a kind of terror, really. It was always so identified with death—anger—not life—But now—supposing—supposing, if she desired to punish Edward and herself—or just herself alone. But no, that was not the way. What was the way, anyhow? What was the way?

And so now brooding in a tortured and half-demented way until her father, noting her mental state, inquired solemnly as to what had come over her of late. Had she had a quarrel with Hauptwanger? He had not seen him about recently. Was she ill in any way? Her appetite had certainly fallen off. She ate scarcely anything. But receiving a prompt “No” to both inquiries he remained curious but inclined to suspend further inquiry for the time being. There was something, of course, but no doubt it would soon come out.

But now—in the face of this—of course there must be action—decision. And so, in view of the thoughts as to self-destruction and the revolver, a decision to try the effect of a physical threat upon Hauptwanger. She would just frighten him. She might even point the gun at him—and see what he would do then. Of course, she could not kill him—she knew that. But supposing—supposing—one aimed—but not at him, really—and—and—(but, oh no!) a spit of fire, a puff of smoke, a deadly bullet—into his heart—into hers afterward, of course. No, no! For then what? Where?

A dozen, a score, of times in less than two days she approached the drawer that held the revolver and looked at it—finally lifting it up but with no thought of doing more than just that at the moment. It was so heavy, so cold, so blue. The very weight and meaning of it terrorized her, although at last—after the twentieth attempt—she was able to fit it into her bosom in such a way that it lay quite firm and still. The horror of it—cold against her breast, where so often during the summer his head had lain.

And then one afternoon, when she could scarcely endure the strain longer—her father demanding: “What is the matter with you, anyhow? Do you know what you’re doing half the time? Is there anything wrong between you and that beau of yours? I see he doesn’t come around any more. It is time that you either married or had nothing more to do with him, anyway. I don’t want any silly nonsense between you and him, you know.” And this effected the very decision which she had most dreaded. Now ... now ... she must act. This evening—at least she must see him again and tell him that she was going to see his father and reveal all—furthermore, that if he did not marry her she would kill him and herself. Show him the gun, maybe, and frighten him with it—if she could—but at any rate make a last plea as well as a threat. If only—if only he would listen this time—not turn on her—become frightened, maybe, and help her,—not curse—or drive her away.

There was the coal-yard of his father that was at the end of an inlet giving into the river. Or his own home. She might go first to the coal office. He would be sure to be leaving there at half past five, or at six he would be nearing his home. At seven or half past departing from that again very likely to see—to see—whom? But best—best to go to the coal office first. He would be coming from there alone. It would be the quickest.

And Hauptwanger coming out of the coal office on this particular evening in the mood and with the air of one with whom all was well. But in the windy dusk of this November evening, arc lights blazing in the distance, the sound of distant cars, distant life, the wind whipping crisp leaves along the ground—the figure of a girl—a familiar cape about her shoulders, suddenly emerging from behind a pile of brick he was accustomed to pass.

“Ed! I want to talk to you a minute.”

“You again! What the hell did I tell you? I ain’t got no time to talk to you, and I won’t! What did I....”

“Now listen, Ed, stop that, now! I’m desperate. I’m desperate, Ed, do you hear? Can’t you see?” Her voice was staccato—almost shrill and yet mournful, too. “I’ve come to tell you that you’ve got to marry me now. You’ve got to—do you hear?” She was fumbling at her breast where lay that heavy blue thing—no longer so cold as when she had placed it there. The handle was upward. She must draw it now—show it—or hold it under her cloak ready so that at the right moment she could show it—and make him understand that unless he did something.... But her hand shaking so that she could scarcely hold it. It was so heavy—so terrible. She could scarcely hear herself adding: “Otherwise, I’m going to your father and mine, now. My father may do something terrible to me but he’ll do more to you. And so will your father when he knows.... But, anyway....” She was about to add: “You’ve got to marry me, and right away too, or, or, I’m going to kill you and myself, that’s all—” and then to produce the revolver, and wave it before him in a threatening dramatic manner.

But before that the uncalculated and non-understanding fury of Hauptwanger. “Well, of all the nerve! Say, cut this out, will ya? Who do you think you are? What did I tell you? Go to my father, if you want to. Go to yours! Who’s afraid? Do you think they’re going to believe a —— like you? I never had anything to do with you, and that’s that!” And then in his anger giving her a push—as much to overawe her as anything.

But then, in spite of her desire not to give way, fury, blindness, pain,—whirling, fiery sparks, such as never in all her life before had she seen—and executing strange, rhythmic, convoluting orbits in her brain—swift, eccentric, red and yet beautiful orbits. And in the center of them the face of Hauptwanger—her beloved—but not as it was now—oh, no—but rather haloed by a strange white light—as it was under the trees in the spring. And herself turning, and in spite of the push, jumping before him.

“You will marry me, Ed, you will! You will! You see this? You will marry me!”

And then, as much to her astonishment as to his—yet with no particular terror to either of them—the thing spitting flame—making a loud noise—jumping almost out of her hand—so much so that before she could turn it away again there was another report—another flash of red in the dusk. And then Hauptwanger, too astonished quite for words at the moment, exclaiming: “Jesus! What are you....” And then, because of a sharp pain in his chest, putting his hand there and adding: “Oh, Christ! I’m shot!” and falling forward to one side of her....

And then herself—those same whirling red sparks in her brain, saying: “Now, now—I must kill myself, too. I must. I must. I must run somewhere and turn this on myself,” only quite unable to lift it at the moment—and because of some one—a man—approaching—a voice—footsteps, running—herself beginning to run—for some tree—some wall—some gate or doorway where she might stop and fire on herself. But a voice: “Hey! Stop that girl!” “Murder!” And another voice from somewhere else: “Hey! Murder! Stop that girl!” And footsteps, hard, quick ones, immediately behind her. And a hand grabbing hers in which was still the pistol, wildly and yet unwittingly held. And as the other hand wrenched at her hand—“Gimme that gun!” And then a strong youth whom she had never seen before—and yet not unlike Eddie either—turning her about—restraining her— “Say, you! What the devil is this, anyhow? Come back here. You can’t get away with this.”

And yet at the same time not unfriendly eyes looking into hers, strong hands holding her, but not too roughly, and herself exclaiming: “Oh, let me go! Let me go! I want to die, too, I tell you! Let me go!” And sobbing great, dry, shaking sobs.

But after that—and all so quickly—crowds—crowds—men and women, boys and girls, and finally policemen gathering about her, each with the rules of his training firmly in mind to get as much general information as possible; to see that the wounded man was hurried to a hospital, the girl to a precinct police station; the names and addresses of various witnesses secured. But with the lorn Ida in a state of collapse—seated upon a doorstep in a yard surrounded by a pushing crowd, while voices rang in her ears: “Where? What? How?” “Sure, sure! Just now, right back there. Sure, they’re calling the ambulance.” “He’s done for, I guess. Twice in the breast. He can’t live.” “Gee! He’s all covered with blood.” “Sure, she did. With a revolver—a great big one. The cop’s got it. She was tryin’ to get away. Sure, Jimmie Allen caught her. He was just comin’ home.” “Yeah. She’s the daughter of old Zobel who keeps the paint store up here in Warren Avenue. I know her. An’ he’s the son of this Hauptwanger here who owns the coal-yard. I used to work for ’em. He lives up in Grey Street.”

But in the meantime young Hauptwanger unconscious and being transferred to an operating table at Mercy Hospital—his case pronounced hopeless—twenty-four hours of life at the very most. And his father and mother hearing the news and running there. And in the same period the tortured Ida transferred to Henderson Avenue Police Station, where in a rear inquisitorial chamber, entirely surrounded by policemen and detectives, she was questioned and requestioned. “Yah say yah seen this fella for the first time over a year ago? Is that right? He just moved into the neighborhood a little while before? Ain’t that so?” And the disconsolate, half-conscious Ida nodding her head. And outside a large, morbid, curious crowd. A beautiful girl! A young man dying! Some sex mystery here.

And in the interim Zobel himself and his wife, duly informed by a burly policeman, hurrying white-faced and strained to the station. My God! My God! And both rushing in breathless. And beads of perspiration on Zobel’s forehead and hands—and misery, misery eating at his vitals. What! His Ida had shot some one! Young Hauptwanger! And in the street, near his office! Murder! Great God! Then there was something between them. There was. There was. But might he not have known? Her white face. Her dreary, forsaken manner these later days. She had been betrayed. That was it. Devils! Devils! That was it! Eighty thousand hells! And after all he had said to her! And all his and his wife’s care of her! And now the neighbors! His business! The police! A public trial! Possibly a sentence—a death sentence! God in heaven! His own daughter, too! And that young scoundrel with his fine airs and fine clothes! Why—why was it that he had let her go with him in the first place? When he might have known—his daughter so inexperienced. “Where is she? My God! My God! This is terrible!”

But seeing her sitting there, white, doleful-looking, and looking up at him when spoken to with an almost meaningless look—a bloodless, smileless face—and saying: “Yes, I shot him. Yes. Yes. He wouldn’t marry me. He should have but he wouldn’t—and so—” And then at once crushing her hands in a sad, tortured way and crying: “Oh, Ed! Ed!” And Zobel exclaiming: “Ach, God! Ida! Ida! In God’s name, it can’t be so. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you come to me? Am I not your father! I would have understood. Of course! Of course! I would have gone to his father—to him. But now—this—and now—” and he began to wring his own hands.

Yet the principal thought in his mind that now the world would know all— And after all his efforts. And beginning volubly to explain to the desk lieutenant and the detectives and policemen all that he knew. But the only thought afloat in the unhappy Ida’s brain, once she awakened again, was: Was this really her father? And was he talking so—of help? That she might have come to him—for what—when she had thought—that—that he would not be like that to her. But ... after a time again ... there was Ed to be thought of. That terrible scene. That terrible accident. She had not intended to do that—really. She had not. She had not. No! But was he really dead? Had she really killed him? That push—almost a blow it was—those words. But still— Oh, dear! Oh, dear! And then beginning to cry to herself, silently and deeply, while Zobel and his wife bent over her for the first time in true sympathy. The complications of life! The terrors! There was no peace for any one on this earth—no peace—no peace. All was madness, really, and sorrow. But they would stand by her now—yes, yes.

But then the reporters. A public furore fanned by the newspapers, with their men and women writers, pen and ink artists, photographers. Their editorials: “Beautiful girl of seventeen shoots lover, twenty-one. Fires two bullets into body of man she charges with refusing to keep faith. About to become a mother. Youth likely to die. Girl admits crime. Pleads to be left alone in misery. Parents of both in despair.” And then columns and columns, day after day—since on the following afternoon at three Hauptwanger did die—admitting that he had wronged her. And a coroner’s jury, called immediately afterwards, holding the girl for subsequent action by the Grand Jury, and without bail. Yet, because of her beauty and the “pathos” of the case—letters to the newspapers, from ministers, society men and women, politicians and the general public, demanding that this wronged girl about to become a mother, and who had committed no wrong other than that of loving too well—if not wisely—be not severely dealt with—be forgiven—be admitted to bail. No jury anywhere would convict her. Not in America. Indeed, it would “go hard” with any jury that would attempt to “further punish” a girl who had already suffered so much. Plainly it was the duty of the judge in this case to admit this poor wronged soul to bail and the peace and quiet of some home or institution where her child might be born, especially since already a woman of extreme wealth and social position, deeply stirred by the pathos of this drama, had not only come forward to sympathize with this innocent victim of love and order and duty, but had offered any amount of bail that she might be released to the peace and quiet of her own home—there to await the outcome of her physical condition as well as the unavoidable prosecution which must fix her future.

And so, to her wonder and confusion, Ida finally released in the custody of this outwardly sober and yet inwardly emotional woman, who ever since the first day of her imprisonment in the central county jail had sought to ingratiate herself into her good graces and emotions—a woman middle-aged and plain but soft-voiced and kindly-mannered, who over and over repeated that she understood, that she also had suffered—that her heart had been torn, too—and that she, Ida, need never worry. And so Ida finally transferred (a bailed prisoner subject to return upon demand) to the wide acres and impressive chambers of a once country but now city residence, an integral part of the best residence area of the city. And there, to her astonishment and wonder—and this in spite of her despair—all needful equipment and service provided—a maid and servants, her food served to her in her room when she wished—silence or entertainment as she chose. And with her own parents allowed to visit her whenever she chose. Yet she was so uncomfortable in their presence always now. True, they were kind—gentle, whenever they came. They spoke of the different life that was to be after this great crisis was truly past—the birth of the child, which was never other than indirectly referred to, or the trial, which was to follow later. There was to be a new store in a new neighborhood. The old one had already been offered for sale. And after that ... well, peace perhaps, or a better life. But even in her father’s eyes as he spoke could she not see the weight of care which he now shouldered? She had sinned! She had killed a man! And wrecked another family—the hearts of two other parents as well as her father’s own peace of mind and commercial and social well-being. And in all his charity, was there room for that? In the solemnity of his manner, as well as that of her stepmother, could she feel that there was?

Yet in the main, and because her mood and health seemed to require it, she was now left to contemplate the inexplicable chain of events which her primary desire for love had brought about. The almost amazing difference in the mental attitude of her parents toward her now and before this dreadful and unfortunate event in her life! So considerate and sympathetic now as to result in an offer of a happier home for her and her child in the future, whereas before all was—or as she sensed it—so threatening and desperate. The strange and to her inexplicable attitude of this woman even—so kind and generous—and this in the face of her sin and shame.

And yet, what peace or quiet could there be for her here or anywhere now? The terrible torture that had preceded that terrible accident! Her Edward’s cry! His death! And when she loved him so! Had! Did now! And yet by his dread perverseness, cruelty, brutality, he had taken himself from her. But still, still—now that he was gone—now that in dying, as she heard he had said, he had been “stuck on her” at first, that she had “set him crazy,” but that afterwards, because of his parents, as well as hers, he had decided that he would not marry her—she could not help but feel more kindly to him. He had been cruel. But had he not died? And at her hands. She had killed him—murdered him. Oh, yes, she had. Oh! Oh! Oh! For in connection with the actual scene did she not recall some one crying that his shirt front had been all bloody. Oh! Oh! Oh! And in her heart, no doubt, when she had jumped in front of him there in the dusk had been rage—rage and hate even, too, for the moment. Oh, yes. But he had cried: “Oh, Christ! I’m shot!” (Her Edward’s cry.)

And so, even in the silence of these richly furnished rooms, with a servant coming to her call, hot, silent tears and deep, racking sobs—when no one was supposed to see or hear—and thoughts, thoughts, thoughts—sombre, bleak—as to her lack of sense, her lack of courage or will to end it all for herself on that dreadful evening when she so easily might have. And now here she had plighted her word that she would do nothing rash—would not attempt to take her life. But the future! The future! And what had she not seen since that dreadful night! Edward’s father and mother at the inquest! And how they had looked at her! Hauptwanger, senior—his strong, broad German face marked with a great anguish. And Mrs. Hauptwanger—small and all in black, and with great hollow rings under her eyes. And crying silently nearly all the time. And both had sworn that they knew nothing of Edward’s conduct, or of his definite interest in her. He was a headstrong, virile, restless boy. They had a hard time controlling him. And yet he had not been a bad boy, either—headstrong but willing to work—and gay—their only son.

At one point in these extensive grounds—entirely surrounded by Lombardy poplars now leafless—there stood a fountain drained of its water for the winter. But upon the pedestal, upon a bronze rock, at the foot of which washed bronze waves of the Rhine, a Rhine maiden of the blonde German Lorelei type, standing erect and a-dream, in youth, in love. And at her feet, on his knees, a German lover of the Ritter type—vigorous, uniformed, his fair blond head and face turned upward to the beauty about whose hips his arms were clasped—his look seeking, urgent. And upon his fair bronze hair, her right hand, the while she bent on him a yearning, yielding glance. Oh, Edward! Oh, love! Spring! She must not come out here any more. And yet evening after evening in early December, once the first great gust of this terrific storm had subsided and she was seeing things in a less drastic light, she was accustomed to return to look at it. And sometimes, even in January, a new moon overhead would suggest King Lake Park! The little boats gliding here and there! She and Edward in one. Herself leaning back and dreaming as now—now—this figure of the girl on the rock was doing. And he—he—at her knees. To be sure, he had cursed her. He had said the indifferent, cruel words that had at last driven her to madness. But once he had loved her just this way. It was there, and only there, that she found spiritual comfort in her sorrow—

But then, in due course, the child—with all these thoughts, moods enveloping it. And after that the trial, with her prompt acquittal. A foreseen conclusion. And with loud public acclaim for that verdict also, since it was all for romance and drastic drama. And then the final leaving of these great rooms and this personal intimate affection that had been showered upon her. For after all the legal, if not the emotional problem, had now been solved. And since her father was not one who was poor or welcomed charity—a contemplated and finally accomplished return to a new world—the new home and store which had been established in a very different and remote part of the city. The child a boy. That was good, for eventually he could care for himself. He would not need her. The new paint shop was near another cross business street, near another moving-picture theatre. And boys and girls here as elsewhere—on the corners—going arm in arm—and herself again at home cooking, sewing, cleaning as before. And with Mrs. Zobel as reserved and dubious as before. For after all, had she not made a mess of her life, and for what? What now? Here forever as a fixture? And even though Zobel, in spite of his grimness, was becoming fond of the child. How wretched, how feeble life really was!

But far away King Lake Park and the old neighborhood. And thoughts that went back to it constantly. She had been so happy the summer before. And now this summer! And other summers to come—even though perhaps some time—once little Eric was grown—there might be some other lover—who would not mind— But, no—no, not that. Never! She did not want that. Could not—would not endure it.

And so at last of a Saturday afternoon, when she had the excuse of certain things needed for Eric, a trip to presumably the central business heart—whereas, in reality, it was to King Lake Park she was going. And once there—the little boats, the familiar paths—a certain nook under the overarching bushes and trees. She knew it so well. It was here that she had demanded to be let out in order that she might go home by herself—so shocked, so ashamed. Yet now seeking it.

The world does not understand such things. It is so busy with so many, many things.

And then dusk—though she should have been returning. Her boy! He would miss her! And then a little wind with a last faint russet glow in the west. And then stars! Quite all the world had gone to its dinner now. The park was all but empty. The water here was so still—so agate. (The world—the world—it will never understand, will it?) Where would Edward be? Would he be meeting her somewhere? Greeting her? Would he forgive,—when she told him all—could she find him, perchance? (The world—the busy, strident, indifferent, matter-of-fact world—how little it knows.)

And then a girl in the silence, in the shadow, making her way down to the very spot that the nose of their boat had nuzzled but one short summer before. And calmly stepping into the water and wading out to her knees—to her waist—her breasts—in the mild, caressing water—and then to her lips and over them—and finally, deliberately—conclusively—sinking beneath its surface and without a cry or sigh.

The world does not understand such things. The tide of life runs too fast. So much that is beautiful—terrible—sweeps by—by—by—without thought—without notice in the great volume.

And yet her body was found—her story retold in great, flaring headlines. (Ida Zobel—Girl Slayer of Hauptwanger a Suicide.) And then ... and then ... forgotten.

VIII
THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

He came to it across the new bridge, from the south where the greater city lay—the older portion—and where he had left his car, and paused at the nearer bridgehead to look at it—the eddying water of the river below, the new docks and piers built on either side since he had left, twenty years before; the once grassy slopes on the farther shore, now almost completely covered with factories, although he could see too, among them, even now, traces of the old, out-of-the-way suburb which he and Marie had known. Chadds Bridge, now an integral part of the greater city, connected by car lines and through streets, was then such a simple, unpretentious affair, a little suburban village just on the edge of this stream and beyond the last straggling northward streets of the great city below, where the car lines stopped and from which one had to walk on foot across this bridge in order to take advantage of the rural quiet and the cheaper—much cheaper—rents, so all-important to him then.

Then he was so poor—he and Marie—a mere stripling of a mechanic and inventor, a student of aeronautics, electricity, engineering, and what not, but newly married and without a dollar, and no clear conception of how his future was to eventuate, whereas now—but somehow he did not want to think of now. Now he was so very rich, comparatively speaking, older, wiser, such a forceful person commercially and in every other way, whereas then he was so lean and pathetic and worried and wistful—a mere uncertain stripling, as he saw himself now, with ideas and ambitions and dreams which were quite out of accord with his immediate prospects or opportunities. It was all right to say, as some one had—Emerson, he believed—“hitch your wagon to a star.” But some people hitched, or tried to, before they were ready. They neglected some of the slower moving vehicles about them, and so did not get on at all—or did not seem to, for the time being.

And that had been his error. He was growing at the time, of course, but he was so restless, so dissatisfied with himself, so unhappy. All the world was apparently tinkling and laughing by, eating, drinking, dancing, growing richer, happier, every minute; whereas he—he and Marie, and the two babies which came a little later—seemed to make no progress at all. None. They were out of it, alone, hidden away in this little semi-rural realm, and it was all so disturbing when elsewhere was so much—to him, at least, if not to her—of all that was worth while—wealth, power, gayety, repute. How intensely, savagely almost, he had craved all of those things in those days, and how far off they still were at that time!

Marie was not like him, soft, clinging little thing that she was, inefficient in most big ways, and yet dear and helpful enough in all little ones—oh, so very much so.

When first he met her in Philadelphia, and later when he brought her over to New York, it seemed as though he could not possibly have made a better engagement for himself. Marie was so sweet, so gentle, with her waxy white pallor, delicately tinted cheeks, soft blackish brown eyes that sought his so gently always, as if seeming to ask, “And what can I do for my dearie now? What can he teach me to do for him?” She was never his equal, mentally or spiritually—that was the dreadful discovery he had made a few months after the first infatuation had worn off, after the ivory of her forehead, the lambent sweetness of her eyes, her tresses, and her delicately rounded figure, had ceased to befuddle his more poetical brain. But how delightful she seemed then in her shabby little clothes and her shabbier little home—all the more so because her delicate white blossom of a face was such a contrast to the drear surroundings in which it shone. Her father was no more than a mechanic, she a little store clerk in the great Rand department store in Philadelphia when he met her, he nothing more than an experimental assistant with the Culver Electric Company, with no technical training of any kind, and only dreams of a technical course at some time or other. The beginnings of his career were so very vague.

His parents were poor too, and he had had to begin to earn his own living, or share, at fourteen. And at twenty-four he had contracted this foolish marriage when he was just beginning to dream of bigger things, to see how they were done, what steps were necessary, what studies, what cogitations and hard, grinding sacrifices even, before one finally achieved anything, especially in the electrical world. The facts which had begun to rise and take color and classify themselves in his mind had all then to develop under the most advantageous conditions thereafter. His salary did not rise at once by any means, just because he was beginning to think of bigger things. He was a no better practical assistant in a laboratory or the equipment department of the several concerns for which he worked, because in his brain were already seething dim outlines of possible improvements in connection with arms, the turbine gun, electro-magnetic distance control, and the rotary excavator. He had ideas, but also as he realized at the time he would have to study privately and long in order to make them real; and his studies at night and Sundays and holidays in the libraries and everywhere else, made him no more helpful, if as much so, in his practical, everyday corporation labors. In fact, for a long time when their finances were at the lowest ebb and the two children had appeared, and they all needed clothes and diversion, and his salary had not been raised, it seemed as though he were actually less valuable to everybody.

But in the meantime Marie had worked for and with him, dear little thing, and although she had seemed so wonderful at first, patient, enduring, thoughtful, later because of their poverty and so many other things which hampered and seemed to interfere with his work, he had wearied of her a little. Over in Philadelphia, where he had accompanied her home of an evening and had watched her help her mother, saw her set the table, wash the dishes, straighten up the house after dinner, and then if it were pleasant go for a walk with him, she seemed ideal, just the wife for him, indeed. Later as he sensed the world, its hardness, its innate selfishness, the necessity for push, courage, unwillingness to be a slave and a drudge, these earlier qualities and charms were the very things that militated against her in his mind. Poor little Marie!

But in other ways his mind was not always on his work, either. Sometimes it was on his dreams of bigger things. Sometimes it was on his silly blindness in wanting to get married so soon, in being betrayed by the sweet innocence and beauty of Marie into saddling himself with this burden when he was scarcely prepared, as he saw after he was married, to work out his own life on a sensible, economic basis. A thought which he had encountered somewhere in some book of philosophy or other (he was always reading in those days) had haunted him—“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune”—and that painful thought seemed to grow with each succeeding day. Why had he been so foolish, why so very foolish, as to get married when he was so unsuitably young! That was a thing the folly of which irritated him all the time.

Not that Marie was not all she should be—far from it!—nor the two little boys (both boys, think of that!), intensely precious to him at first. No, that was not it, but this, that whatever the values and the charms of these (and they were wonderful at first), he personally was not prepared to bear or enjoy them as yet. He was too young, too restless, too nebulous, too inventively dreamful. He did not, as he had so often thought since, know what he wanted—only, when they began to have such a very hard time, he knew he did not want that. Why, after the first year of their marriage, when Peter was born, and because of better trade conditions in the electrical world, they had moved over here (he was making only twenty-two dollars a week at the time), everything had seemed to go wrong. Indeed, nothing ever seemed to go right any more after that, not one thing.

First it was Marie’s illness after Peter’s birth, which kept him on tenterhooks and took all he could rake and scrape and save to pay the doctor’s bill, and stole half her beauty, if not more. She always looked a little pinched and weak after that. (And he had charged that up to her, too!) Then it was some ailment which affected Peter for months and which proved to be undernourishment, due to a defect in Marie’s condition even after she had seemingly recovered. Then, two years later, it was the birth of Frank, due to another error, of course, he being not intended in Marie’s frail state; and then his own difficulties with the manager of the insulating department of the International Electric, due to his own nervous state, his worries, his consciousness of error in the manipulation of his own career—and Marie’s. Life was slipping away, as he saw it then and he kept thinking he was growing older, was not getting on as he had thought he should, was not achieving his technical education; he was saddled with a family which would prevent him from ever getting on. Here, in this neighborhood, all this had occurred—this quiet, run-down realm, so greatly changed since he had seen it last. Yes, it had all happened here.

But how peaceful it was to-day, although changed. How the water ran under this bridge now, as then, eddying out to sea. And how this late October afternoon reminded him of that other October afternoon when they had first walked up here—warm, pleasant, colorful. Would he ever forget that afternoon? He had thought he was going to do so much better—was praying that he would, and they had done so much worse. He, personally, had grown so restless and dissatisfied with himself and her and life. And things seemed to be almost as bad as they could be, drifting indefinitely on to nothing. Indeed, life seemed to gather as a storm and break. He was discharged from the International Electric, due supposedly to his taking home for a night a battery for an experiment he was making but in reality because of the opposition of his superior, based on the latter’s contempt for his constantly (possibly) depressed and dissatisfied air, his brooding mien, and some minor inattentions due to the state of his mind at the time.

Then, quite as swiftly (out of black plotting or evil thoughts of his own, perhaps), Peter had died of pneumonia. And three days later Frank. There were two funerals, two dreary, one-carriage affairs—he remembered that so well!—for they had no money; and his pawned watch, five dollars from Marie’s mother, and seven chemical and electrical works sold to an old book man had provided the cash advance required by the undertaker! Then, spiritually, something seemed to break within him. He could not see this world, this immediate life in which he was involved, as having any significance in it for himself or any one after that. He could not stand it any more, the weariness, the boredom, the dissatisfaction with himself, the failure of himself, the sickening chain of disasters which had befallen this earlier adventure. And so—

But that was why he was here to-day, after all these years—twenty-four, to be exact—with his interest in this old region so keen, if so sad. Why, there—there!—was a flock of pigeons, just like those of old Abijah Hargot’s, flying around the sky now, as then. And a curl of smoke creeping up from Tanzer’s blacksmith shop, or the one that had succeeded it, just one block from this bridge. How well he remembered old Tanzer and his forge, his swelling muscles and sooty face! He had always nodded in such a friendly way as he passed and talked of the pest of flies and heat in summer. That was why he was pausing on this bridge to-day, just to see once more, to feel, standing in the pleasant afternoon sun of this October day and gazing across the swirling waters below at the new coal-pockets, the enlarged lamp works of the George C. Woodruff Company, once a mere shed hidden away at a corner of this nearest street and rented out here no doubt because it was cheap and Woodruff was just beginning—just as he did twenty-four years before. Time had sped by so swiftly. One’s ideals and ideas changed so. Twenty years ago he would have given so much to be what he was now—rich and fairly powerful—and now—now—The beauty of this old neighborhood, to-day, even.

The buff school which crowned the rise beyond, and the broad asphalt of Edgewood Avenue leading up to the old five-story flat building—the only one out here, and a failure financially—in which he and Marie had had their miserable little apartment—here it was, still to be seen. Yes, it and so many other things were all here; that group of great oaks before old Hargot’s door; the little red—if now rusted—weather-vane over his carriage house; the tall romantic tower of St. George’s Episcopal Church—so far to the west over the river, and the spars and masts of vessels that still docked here for a while. But dark memories they generated, too, along with a certain idyllic sweetness, which had seemed to envelop the whole at first. For though it had had sweetness and peace at first, how much that had been bitter and spiritually destroying had occurred here, too.

How well he recalled, for instance, the day he and Marie had wandered up here, almost hand in hand, across this very bridge and up Edgewood Avenue, nearly twenty-four years before! They had been so happy at first, dreaming their little dream of a wonderful future for them—and now—well, his secret agency had brought him all there was to know of her and her mother and her little world after he had left. They had suffered so much, apparently, and all on account of him. But somehow he did not want to think of that now. It was not for that he had come to-day, but to see, to dream over the older, the better, the first days.

He crossed over, following the old road which had then been a cobble wagon trail, and turned into Edgewood Avenue which led up past the line of semi-country homes which he used to dread so much, homes which because of their superior prosperity, wide lawns, flowers and walks, made the life which he and Marie were compelled to lead here seem so lean and meagre by contrast. Why, yes, here was the very residence of Gatewood, the dentist, so prosperous then and with an office downtown; and that of Dr. Newton, whom he had called in when Peter and Frank were taken ill that last time; and Temple, the druggist, and Stoutmeyer, the grocer—both of whom he had left owing money; and Dr. Newton, too, for that matter—although all had subsequently been paid. Not a sign of the names of either Gatewood or Newton on their windows or gates now; not a trace of Temple’s drug store. But here was Stoutmeyer’s grocery just the same. And Buchspiel, the butcher. (Could he still be alive, by any chance—was that his stout, aged figure within?) And Ortman, the baker—not a sign of change there. And over the way the then village school, now Public School No. 261, as he could see. And across from it, beyond, the slim little, almost accidental (for this region) five-story apartment house—built because of an error in judgment, of course, when they thought the city was going to grow out this way—a thing of grayish-white brick. On the fifth floor of this, in the rear, he and Marie had at last found a tiny apartment of three rooms and bath, cheap enough for them to occupy in the growing city and still pay their way. What memories the mere sight of the building evoked! Where were all the people now who used to bustle about here of a summer evening when he and Marie were here, boys and girls, grown men and women of the neighborhood? It had all been so pleasant at first, Marie up there preparing dinner and he coming home promptly at seven and sometimes whistling as he came! He was not always unhappy, even here.

Yes, all was exactly as it had been in the old days in regard to this building and this school, even—as he lived!—a “For Rent” sign in that very same apartment, four flights up, as it had been that warm October day when they had first come up here seeking.

But what a change in himself—stouter, so much older, gray now. And Marie—dying a few years after in this very region without his ever seeing her again or she him—and she had written him such pathetic letters. She had been broken, no doubt, spiritually and in every other way when he left her,—no pointless vanity in that, alas—it was too sad to involve vanity. Yes, he had done that. Would it ever be forgiven him? Would his error of ambition and self-dissatisfaction be seen anywhere in any kindly light—on earth or in heaven? He had suffered so from remorse in regard to it of late. Indeed, now that he was rich and so successful the thought of it had begun to torture him. Some time since—five years ago—he had thought to make amends, but then—well, then he had found that she wasn’t any more. Poor little Marie!

But these walls, so strong and enduring (stone had this advantage over human flesh!), were quite as he had left them, quite as they were the day he and Marie had first come here—hopeful, cheerful, although later so depressed, the two of them. (And he had charged her spiritually with it all, or nearly so—its fatalities and gloom, as though she could have avoided them!)

The ruthlessness of it!

The sheer brutality!

The ignorance!

If she could but see him now, his great shops and factories, his hundreds of employés, his present wife and children, his great new home—and still know how he felt about her! If he could only call her back and tell her, apologize, explain, make some amends! But no; life did not work that way. Doors opened and doors closed. It had no consideration for eleventh-hour repentances. As though they mattered to life, or anything else! He could tell her something now, of course, explain the psychology, let her know how pathetically depressed and weary he had felt then. But would she understand, care, forgive? She had been so fond of him, done so much for him in her small, sweet way. And yet, if she only knew, he could scarcely have helped doing as he did then, so harried and depressed and eager for advancement had he been, self-convinced of his own error and failure before ever his life had a good start. If she could only see how little all his later triumphs mattered now, how much he would be glad to do for her now! if only—only—he could. Well, he must quit these thoughts. They did not help at all, nor his coming out here and feeling this way!

But life was so automatic and unconsciously cruel at times. One’s disposition drove one so, shutting and bolting doors behind one, driving one on and on like a harried steer up a narrow runway to one’s fate. He could have been happy right here with Marie and the children—as much so as he had ever been since. Or, if he had only taken Marie along, once the little ones were gone—they might have been happy enough together. They might have been! But no, no; something in him at that time would not let him. Really, he was a victim of his own grim impulses, dreams, passions, mad and illogical as that might seem. He was crazy for success, wild with a desire for a superior, contemptuous position in the world. People were so, at times. He had been. He had had to do as he did, so horribly would he have suffered mentally if he had not, all the theories of the moralists to the contrary notwithstanding. The notions of one’s youth were not necessarily those of age, and that was why he was here to-day in this very gloomy and contrite mood.

He went around the corner now to the side entrance of the old apartment house, and paused. For there, down the street, almost—not quite—as he had left it, was the residence of the quondam old Abijah Hargot, he of the pigeons,—iron manufacturer and Presbyterian, who even in his day was living there in spite of the fact that the truly princely residence suburbs had long since moved much farther out and he was being entirely surrounded by an element of cheaper life which could not have been exactly pleasant to him. In those days he and Marie had heard of the hardwood floors, the great chandeliers, the rugs and pictures of the house that had once faced a wide sward leading down to the river’s edge itself. But look at it now! A lumber-yard between it and the river! And some sort of a small shop or factory on this end of the lawn! And in his day, Abijah had kept a pet Jersey cow nibbling the grass under the trees and fantailed pigeons on the slate roof of his barn, at the corner where now was this small factory, and at the back of his house an immense patch of golden glow just outside the conservatory facing the east, and also two pagodas down near the river. But all gone! all gone, or nearly so. Just the house and a part of the lawn. And occupied now by whom? In the old days he had never dared dream, or scarcely so, that some day, years later—when he would be much older and sadder, really, and haunted by the ghosts of these very things—he would be able to return here and know that he had far more imposing toys than old Hargot had ever dreamed of, as rich as he was.

Toys!

Toys!

Yes, they were toys, for one played with them a little while, as with so many things, and then laid them aside forever.

Toys!

Toys!

But then, as he had since come to know, old Hargot had not been without his troubles, in spite of all his money. For, as rumor had it then, his oldest son, Lucien, his pride, in those days, a slim, artistic type of boy, had turned out a drunkard, gambler, night-life lover; had run with women, become afflicted with all sorts of ills, and after his father had cut him off and driven him out (refusing to permit him even to visit the home), had hung about here, so the neighbors had said, and stolen in to see his mother, especially on dark or rainy nights, in order to get aid from her. And, like all mothers, she had aided him secretly, or so they said, in spite of her fear of her husband. Mothers were like that—his mother, too. Neighbors testified that they had seen her whispering to him in the shade of the trees of the lawn or around the corner in the next street—a sad, brooding, care-worn woman, always in black or dark blue. Yes, life held its disappointments for every one, of course, even old Abijah and himself.

He went on to the door and paused, wondering whether to go up or not, for the atmosphere of this building and this neighborhood was very, very sad now, very redolent of old, sweet, dead and half-forgotten things. The river there, running so freshly at the foot of the street; the school where the children used to play and shout, while he worked on certain idle days when there was no work at the factory; the little church up the street to which so many commonplace adherents used to make their way on Sunday; the shabby cabin of the plumber farther up this same street, who used to go tearing off every Saturday and Sunday in a rattle-trap car which he had bought second-hand and which squeaked and groaned, for all the expert repairing he had been able to do upon it.

The color, the humor, the sunshine of those old first days, in spite of their poverty!

He hesitated as to whether to ring the bell or no—just as he and Marie had, twenty-odd years before. She was so gay then, so hopeful, so all-unconscious of the rough fate that was in store for her here.... How would it be inside? Would Marie’s little gas stove still be near the window in the combined kitchen, dining-room and laundry—almost general living-room—which that one room was? Would the thin single gas jet still be hanging from the ceiling over their small dining-room table (or the ghost of it) where so often after their meals, to save heat in the other room—because there was no heat in the alleged radiator, and their oil stove cost money—he had sat and read or worked on plans of some of the things he hoped to perfect—and had since, years since, but long after he had left her and this place? How sad! He had never had one touch of luck or opportunity with her here,—not one. Yet, if only she could, and without pain because of it, know how brilliantly he had finished some of them, how profitably they had resulted for him if not her.

But he scarcely looked like one who would be wanting to see so small an apartment, he now felt, tall and robust and prosperous as he was. Still might he not be thinking of buying this place? Or renting quarters for a servant or a relative? Who should know? What difference did it make? Why should he care?

He rang the bell, thinking of the small, stupid, unfriendly and self-defensive woman who, twenty or more years before, had come up from the basement below, wiping her hands on a gingham apron and staring at them querulously. How well he remembered her—and how unfriendly she had always remained in spite of their efforts to be friendly, because they had no tips to give her. She could not be here any longer, of course; no, this one coming was unlike her in everything except stupidity and grossness. But they were alike in that, well enough. This one was heavy, beefy. She would make almost two of the other one.

“The rooms,” he had almost said “apartment,” “on the top floor—may I see them?”

“Dey are only t’ree an’ bat’—fourteen by der mont’.”

“Yes, I know,” he now added almost sadly. So they had not raised the rent in all this time, although the city had grown so. Evidently this region had become worse, not better. “I’ll look at them, if you please, just the same,” he went on, feeling that the dull face before him was wondering why he should be looking at them at all.

“Vait; I getcha der key. You can go up py yerself.”

He might have known that she would never climb any four flights save under compulsion.

She returned presently, and he made his way upward, remembering how the fat husband of the former janitress had climbed up promptly every night at ten, if you please, putting out the wee lights of gas on the return trip (all but a thin flame on the second floor: orders from the landlord, of course), and exclaiming as he did so, at each landing, “Ach Gott, I go me up py der secon’ floor ant make me der lights out. Ach Gott, I go me py der t’ird floor ant make me der lights out. Ach Gott, I go me py der fourt’ floor ant make me der lights out,” and so on until he reached the fifth, where they lived. How often he had listened to him, puffing and moaning as he came!

Yes, the yellowish-brown paper that they had abhorred then, or one nearly as bad, covered all these hall walls to-day. The stairs squeaked, just as they had then. The hall gas jets were just as small and surmounted by shabby little pink imitation glass candles—to give the place an air, no doubt! He and Marie would never have taken this place at all if it had depended on the hall, or if the views from its little windows had not been so fine. In the old days he had trudged up these steps many a night, winter and summer, listening, as he came, for sounds of Marie in the kitchen, for the prattle of the two children after they were with them, for the glow of a friendly light (always shining at six in winter) under the door and through the keyhole. His light! His door! In those early dark winter days, when he was working so far downtown and coming home this way regularly, Marie, at the sound of his key in the lock, would always come running, her heavy black hair done in a neat braid about her brow, her trim little figure buttoned gracefully into a house-dress of her own making. And she always had a smile and a “Hello, dearie; back again?” no matter how bad things were with them, how lean the little larder or the family purse. Poor little Marie!

It all came back to him now as he trudged up the stairs and neared the door. God!

And here was the very door, unchanged—yellow, painted to imitate the natural grain of oak, but the job having turned out a dismal failure as he had noted years before. And the very lock the same! Could he believe? Scarcely any doubt of it. For here was that other old hole, stuffed with putty and painted over, which he and Marie had noted as being the scar of some other kind of a lock or knob that had preceded this one. And still stuffed with paper! Marie had thought burglars (!) might make their way in via that, and he had laughed to think what they would steal if they should. Poor little Marie!

But now, now—well, here he was all alone, twenty-four years later, Marie and Peter and Frank gone this long time, and he the master of so many men and so much power and so much important property. What was life, anyhow? What was it?

Ghosts! Ghosts!

Were there ghosts?

Did spirits sometimes return and live and dream over old, sad scenes such as this? Could Marie? Would she? Did she?

Oh, Marie!... Marie! Poor little weak, storm-beaten, life-beaten soul. And he the storm, really.

Well, here was the inside now, and things were not a bit different from what they had been in his and her day, when they had both been so poor. No, just the same. The floor a little more nail-marked, perhaps, especially in the kitchen here, where no doubt family after family had tacked down oil-cloth in place of other pieces taken up—theirs, for instance. And here in the parlor—save the mark!—the paper as violent as it had ever been! Such paper—red, with great bowls of pinkish flowers arranged in orderly rows! But then they were paying so little rent that it was ridiculous for them to suggest that they wanted anything changed. The landlord would not have changed it anyhow.

And here on the west wall, between the two windows, overlooking Abijah Hargot’s home and the river and the creeping city beyond, was where he had hung a wretched little picture, a print of an etching of a waterscape which he had admired so much in those days and had bought somewhere second-hand for a dollar—a house on an inlet near the sea, such a house as he would have liked to have occupied, or thought he would—then. Ah, these windows! The northernmost one had always been preferred by him and her because of the sweep of view west and north. And how often he had stood looking at a soft, or bleak, or reddening, sunset over the river; or, of an early night in winter, at the lights on the water below. And the outpost apartments and homes of the great city beyond. Life had looked very dark then, indeed. At times, looking, he had been very sad. He was like some brooding Hamlet of an inventor as he stood there then gazing at the sweet little river, the twinkling stars in a steely black sky overhead; or, in the fall when it was still light, some cold red island of a cloud in the sky over the river and the city, and wondering what was to become of him—what was in store for him! The fallacy of such memories as these! Their futility!

But things had dragged and dragged—here! In spite of the fact that his mind was full of inventions, inventions, inventions, and methods of applying them in some general way which would earn him money, place, fame—as they subsequently did—the strange mysteries of ionic or electronic action, for instance, of motion, of attraction and polarity, of wave lengths and tensile strengths and adhesions in metals, woods and materials of all kinds—his apparent error in putting himself in a position where failure might come to him had so preyed on his mind here, that he could do nothing. He could only dream, and do common, ordinary day labor—skeleton wiring and insulating, for instance, electrical mapping, and the like. Again, later, but while still here, since he had been reading, reading, reading after marriage, and working and thinking, life had gone off into a kind of welter of conflicting and yet organized and plainly directed powers which was confusing to him, which was not to be explained by anything man could think of and which no inventor had as yet fully used, however great he was—Edison, Kelvin, or Bell. Everything as he knew then and hoped to make use of in some way was alive, everything full of force, even so-called dead or decaying things. Life was force, that strange, seemingly (at times) intelligent thing, and there was apparently nothing but force—everywhere—amazing, perfect, indestructible. (He had thought of all that here in this little room and on the roof overhead where he made some of his experiments, watching old Hargot’s pigeons flying about the sky, the sound of their wings coming so close at times that they were like a whisper of the waves of the sea, dreams in themselves.)

But the little boundaries of so-called health and decay, strength and weakness, as well as all alleged fixity or changelessness of things,—how he had brooded on all that, at that time. And how all thought of fixity in anything had disappeared as a ridiculous illusion intended, maybe, by something to fool man into the belief that his world here, his physical and mental state, was real and enduring, a greater thing than anything else in the universe, when so plainly it was not. But not himself. A mere shadow—an illusion—nothing. On this little roof, here, sitting alone at night or by day in pleasant weather or gray, Saturdays and Sundays when it was warm and because they had no money and no particular place to go, and looking at the stars or the lights of the city or the sun shining on the waters of the little river below,—he had thought of all this. It had all come to him, the evanescence of everything, its slippery, protean changefulness. Everything was alive, and everything was nothing, in so far as its seeming reality was concerned. And yet everything was everything but still capable of being undermined, changed, improved, or come at in some hitherto undreamed-of way—even by so humble a creature as himself, an inventor—and used as chained force, if only one knew how. And that was why he had become a great inventor since—because he had thought so—had chained force and used it—even he. He had become conscious of anterior as well as ulterior forces and immensities and fathomless wells of wisdom and energy, and had enslaved a minute portion of them, that was all. But not here! Oh, no. Later!

The sad part of it, as he thought of it now, was that poor little Marie could not have understood a thing of all he was thinking, even if he had explained and explained, as he never attempted to do. Life was all a mystery to Marie—deep, dark, strange—as it was to him, only he was seeking and she was not. Sufficient to her to be near him, loving him in her simple, dumb way, not seeking to understand. Even then he had realized that and begun to condemn her for it in his mind, to feel that she was no real aid and could never be—just a mother-girl, a housewife, a social fixture, a cook, destined to be shoved back if ever he were really successful; and that was sad even then, however obviously true.

But to her, apparently, he was so much more than just a mere man—a god, really, a dream, a beau, a most wonderful person, dreaming strange dreams and thinking strange thoughts which would lead him heaven knows where; how high or how strange, though, she could never guess, nor even he then. And for that very reason—her blind, non-understanding adoration—she had bored him then, horribly at times. All that he could think of then, as he looked at her at times—after the first year or two or three, when the novelty of her physical beauty and charm had worn off and the children had come, and cares and worries due to his non-success were upon them—was that she was an honest, faithful, patient, adoring little drudge, but no more, and that was all she would ever be. Think of that! That was the way life was—the way it rewarded love! He had not begun to dislike her—no, that was not it—but it was because, as the philosopher had said, that in and through her and the babies he had given hostages to fortune, and that she was not exactly the type of woman who could further him as fast as he wished—that he had begun to weary of her. And that was practically the whole base of his objection to her,—not anything she did.

Yes, yes—it was that, that, that had begun to plague him as though he had consciously fastened a ball and chain on one foot and now never any more could walk quickly or well or be really free. Instead of being able to think on his inventions he was constantly being compelled to think on how he would make a living for her and them, or find ten more dollars, or get a new dress for Marie and shoes for the children! Or how increase his salary. That was the great and enduring problem all the time, and over and over here. Although healthy, vigorous and savagely ambitious, at that time, it was precisely because he was those things that he had rebelled so and had desired to be free. He was too strong and fretful as he could see now to endure so mean a life. It was that that had made him savage, curt, remote, indifferent so much of the time in these later days—here— And to her. And when she could not help it at all—poor little thing—did not know how to help it and had never asked him to marry her! Life had tinkled so in his ears then. It had called and called. And essentially, in his own eyes then, he was as much of a failure as a husband as he was at his work, and that was killing him. His mind had been too steadily depressed by his mistake in getting married, in having children so soon, as well as by his growing knowledge of what he might be fitted to do if only he had a chance to go off to a big technical school somewhere and work his way through alone and so get a new and better position somewhere else—to have a change of scene. For once, as he knew then, and with all his ideas, he was technically fitted for his work, with new light and experience in his mind, what wonders might he not accomplish! Sitting in this little room, or working or dreaming upstairs in the air, how often he had thought of all that!

But no; nothing happened for ever so long here. Days and weeks and months, and even years went by without perceptible change. Nature seemed to take a vicious delight in torturing him, then, in so far as his dreams were concerned, his hopes. Hard times came to America, blasting ones—a year and a half of panic really—in which every one hung on to his pathetic little place, and even he was afraid to relinquish the meagre one he had, let alone ask for more pay. At the same time his dreams, the passing of his youth, this unconscionable burden of a family, tortured him more and more. Marie did not seem to mind anything much, so long as she was with him. She suffered, of course, but more for him than for herself, for his unrest, and his dissatisfaction, which she feared. Would he ever leave her? Was he becoming unhappy with her? Her eyes so often asked what her lips feared to frame.

Once they had seventy dollars saved toward some inventive work of his. But then little Peter fell from the top of the washtub, where he had climbed for some reason, and broke his arm. Before it was healed and all the bills paid, the seventy was gone. Another time Marie’s mother was dying, or so she thought, and she had to go back home and help her father and brother in their loneliness. Again, it was brother George who, broke, arrived from Philadelphia and lived with them a while because he had no place else to go. Also once he thought to better himself by leaving the International Electric, and joining the Winston Castro Generator Company. But when he had left the first, the manager of the second, to whom he had applied and by whom he had been engaged, was discharged (“let out,” as he phrased it), and the succeeding man did not want him. So for three long months he had been without anything, and, like Job, finally, he had been ready to curse God and die.

And then—right here in these rooms it was—he had rebelled, spiritually, as he now recalled, and had said to himself that he could not stand this any longer, that he was ruining his life, and that however much it might torture Marie—ruin her even—he must leave and do something to better his state. Yes quite definitely, once and for all, then, he had wished that he had not married Marie, that they had never been so foolish as to have children, that Marie was not dependent on him any more, that he was free to go, be, do, all the things he felt that he could go do, be—no matter where, so long as he went and was free. Yes, he had wished that in a violent, rebellious, prayerful way, and then—

Of all the winters of his life, the one that followed that was the blackest and bleakest, that last one with Marie. It seemed to bring absolutely nothing to either him or her or the children save disaster. Twenty-five dollars was all he had ever been able to make, apparently, while he was with her. The children were growing and constantly requiring more; Marie needed many things, and was skimping along on God knows what. Once she had made herself some corset slips and other things out of his cast-off underwear—bad as that was! And then once, when he was crossing Chadds Bridge, just below here, and had paused to meditate and dream, a new hat—his very best, needless to say, for he had worn his old one until it was quite gone—had blown off into the water, a swift wind and some bundles he was compelled to carry home aiding, and had been swiftly carried out by the tide. So much had he been harried in those days by one thing and another that at first he had not even raged, although he was accustomed so to do. Instead then he had just shut his teeth and trudged on in the biting wind, in danger of taking cold and dying of something or other—as he had thought at the time—only then he had said to himself that he did not really mind now. What difference did it make to himself or anybody whether he died or not? Did anybody care really, God or anybody else, what became of him? Supposing he did it? What of it? Could it be any worse than this? To hell with life itself, and its Maker,—this brutal buffeting of winds and cold and harrying hungers and jealousies and fears and brutalities, arranged to drive and make miserable these crawling, beggarly creatures—men! Why, what had he ever had of God or any creative force so far? What had God ever done for him or his life, or his wife and children?

So he had defiantly raged.

And then life—or God, or what you will—had seemed to strike at last. It was as if some Jinnee of humane or inhuman power had said, “Very well, then, since you are so dissatisfied and unhappy, so unworthy of all this (perhaps) that I have given you, you shall have your will, your dreams. You have prayed to be free. Even so—this thing that you see here now shall pass away. You have sinned against love and faith in your thoughts. You shall be free! Look! Behold! You shall be! Your dreams shall come true!”

And then, at once, as if in answer to this command of the Jinnee, as though, for instance, it had waved its hand, the final storm began which blew everything quite away. Fate struck. It was as if black angels had entered and stationed themselves at his doors and windows, armed with the swords of destruction, of death. Harpies and furies beset his path and perched on his roof. One night—it was a month before Peter and Frank died, only three days before they contracted their final illness—he was crossing this same bridge below here and was speculating, as usual, as to his life and his future, when suddenly, in spite of the wind and cold and some dust flying from a coal barge below, his eye was attracted by two lights which seemed to come dancing down the hill from the direction of his apartment and passed out over the river. They rose to cross over the bridge in front of him and disappeared on the other side. They came so close they seemed almost to brush his face, and yet he could not quite accept them as real. There was something too eerie about them. From the moment he first laid eyes on them in the distance they seemed strange. They came so easily, gracefully, and went so. From the first moment he saw them there below Tegetmiller’s paint shop, he wondered about them. What were they? What could they mean? They were so bluish clear, like faint, grey stars, so pale and watery. Suddenly it was as if something whispered to him, “Behold! These are the souls of your children. They are going—never to return! See! Your prayers are being answered!”

And then it was that, struck with a kind of horror and numb despair, he had hurried home, quite prepared to ask Marie if the two boys were dead or if anything had happened to them. But, finding them up and playing as usual he had tried to put away all thought of this fact as a delusion, to say nothing. But the lights haunted him. They would not stay out of his mind. Would his boys really die? Yet the first and the second day went without change. But on the third both boys took sick, and he knew his dread was well founded.

For on the instant, Marie was thrown into a deep, almost inexplicable, depression, from which there was no arousing her, although she attempted to conceal it from him by waiting on and worrying over them. They had to put the children in the one little bedroom (theirs), while they used an extension cot in the “parlor,” previously occupied by the children. Young Dr. Newton, the one physician of repute in the neighborhood, was called in, and old Mrs. Wertzel, the German woman in front, who, being old and lonely and very fond of Marie, had volunteered her services. And so they had weathered along, God only knows how. Marie prepared the meals—or nearly all of them—as best she could. He had gone to work each day, half in a dream, wondering what the end was to be.

And then one night, as he and Marie were lying on the cot pretending to sleep, he felt her crying. And taking her in his arms he had tried to unwish all the dark things he had wished, only apparently then it was too late. Something told him it was. It was as though in some dark mansion somewhere—some supernal court or hall of light or darkness—his prayer had been registered and answered, a decision made, and that that decision could not now be unmade. No. Into this shabby little room where they lay and where she was crying had come a final black emissary, scaled, knightly, with immense arms and wings and a glittering sword, all black, and would not leave until all this should go before him. Perhaps he had been a little deranged in his mind at the time, but so it had seemed.

And then, just a few weeks after he had seen the lights and a few days after Marie had cried so, Peter had died—poor weak little thing that he was—and, three days later, Frank. Those terrible hours! For by then he was feeling so strange and sad and mystical about it all that he could neither eat nor sleep nor weep nor work nor think. He had gone about, as indeed had Marie, in a kind of stupor of misery and despair. True, as he now told himself—and then too, really,—he had not loved the children with all the devotion he should have or he would never have had the thoughts he had had—or so he had reasoned afterward. Yet then as now he suffered because of the love he should have given them, and had not—and now could not any more, save in memory. He recalled how both boys looked in those last sad days, their pinched little faces and small weak hands! Marie was crushed, and yet dearer for the time being than ever before. But the two children, once gone, had seemed the victims of his own dark thoughts as though his own angry, resentful wishes had slain them. And so, for the time, his mood changed. He wished, if he could, that he might undo it all, go on as before with Marie, have other children to replace these lost ones in her affection—but no. It was apparently not to be, not ever any more.

For, once they were gone, the cords which had held him and Marie together were weaker, not stronger—almost broken, really. For the charm which Marie had originally had for him had mostly been merged in the vivacity and vitality and interest of these two prattling curly-headed boys. Despite the financial burden, the irritation and drain they had been at times, they had also proved a binding chain, a touch of sweetness in the relationship, a hope for the future, a balance which had kept even this uneven scale. With them present he had felt that however black the situation it must endure because of them, their growing interests; with them gone, it was rather plain that some modification of their old state was possible—just how, for the moment, he scarcely dared think or wish. It might be that he could go away and study for awhile now. There was no need of his staying here. The neighborhood was too redolent now of the miseries they had endured. Alone somewhere else, perhaps, he could collect his thoughts, think out a new program. If he went away he might eventually succeed in doing better by Marie. She could return to her parents in Philadelphia for a little while and wait for him, working there at something as she had before until he was ready to send for her. The heavy load of debts could wait until he was better able to pay them. In the meantime, also, he could work and whatever he made over and above his absolute necessities might go to her—or to clearing off these debts.

So he had reasoned.

But it had not worked out so of course. No. In the broken mood in which Marie then was it was not so easy. Plainly, since he had run across her that April day in Philadelphia when he was wiring for the great dry goods store, her whole life had become identified with his, although his had not become merged with hers. No. She was, and would be, as he could so plainly see, then, nothing without him, whereas he—he—Well, it had long since been plain that he would be better off without her—materially, anyhow. But what would she do if he stayed away a long time—or never came back? What become? Had he thought of that then? Yes, he had. He had even thought that once away he might not feel like renewing this situation which had proved so disastrous. And Marie had seemed to sense that, too. She was so sad. True he had not thought of all these things in any bold outright fashion then. Rather they were as sly, evasive shadows skulking in the remote recesses of his brain, things which scarcely dared show their faces to the light, although later, once safely away—they had come forth boldly enough. Only at that time, and later—even now, he could not help feeling that however much Marie might have lacked originally, or then, the fault for their might was his,—that if he himself had not been so dull in the first instance all these black things would not have happened to him or to her. But could she go on without him? Would she? he had asked himself then. And answered that it would be better for him to leave and build himself up in a different world, and then return and help her later. So he fretted and reasoned.

But time had solved all that, too. In spite of the fact that he could not help picturing her back there alone with her parents in Philadelphia, their poor little cottage in Leigh Street in which she and her parents had lived—not a cottage either, but a minute little brick pigeon-hole in one of those long lines of red, treeless, smoky barracks flanking the great mills of what was known as the Reffington District, where her father worked—he had gone. He had asked himself what would she be doing there? What thinking, all alone without him—the babies dead? But he had gone.

He recalled so well the day he left her—she to go to Philadelphia, he to Boston, presumably—the tears, the depression, the unbelievable sadness in her soul and his. Did she suspect? Did she foreknow? She was so gentle, even then, so trustful, so sad. “You will come back to me, dearie, won’t you, soon?” she had said, and so sadly. “We will be happy yet, won’t we?” she had asked between sobs. And he had promised. Oh yes; he had done much promising in his life, before and since. That was one of the darkest things in his nature, his power of promising.

But had he kept that?

However much in after months and years he told himself that he wanted to, that he must, that it was only fair, decent, right, still he had not gone back. No. Other things had come up with the passing of the days, weeks, months, years, other forces, other interests. Some plan, person, desire had always intervened, interfered, warned, counseled, delayed. Were there such counselors? There had been times during the first year when he had written her and sent her a little money—money he had needed badly enough himself. Later there was that long period in which he felt that she must be getting along well enough, being with her parents and at work, and he had not written. A second woman had already appeared on the scene by then as a friend. And then—

The months and years since then in which he had not done so! After his college course—which he took up after he left Marie, working his way—he had left Boston and gone to K—— to begin a career as an assistant plant manager and a developer of ideas of his own, selling the rights to such things as he invented to the great company with which he was connected. And then it was that by degrees the idea of a complete independence and a much greater life had occurred to him. He found himself so strong, so interesting to others. Why not be free, once and for all? Why not grow greater? Why not go forward and work out all the things about which he had dreamed? The thing from which he had extricated himself was too confining, too narrow. It would not do to return. The old shell could not now contain him. Despite her tenderness, Marie was not significant enough. So—He had already seen so much that he could do, be, new faces, a new world, women of a higher social level.

But even so, the pathetic little letters which still followed from time to time—not addressed to him in his new world (she did not know where he was), but to him in the old one—saying how dearly she loved him, how she still awaited his return, that she knew he was having a hard time, that she prayed always, and that all would come out right yet, that they would be able to be together yet!—she was working, saving, praying for him! True, he had the excuse that for the first four years he had not really made anything much, but still he might have done something for her,—might he not have?—gone back, persuaded her to let him go, made her comfortable, brought her somewhat nearer him even? Instead he had feared, feared, reasoned, argued.

Yes, the then devil of his nature, his ambition, had held him completely. He was seeing too clearly the wonder of what he might be, and soon, what he was already becoming. Everything as he argued then and saw now would have had to be pushed aside for Marie, whereas what he really desired was that his great career, his greater days, his fame, the thing he was sure to be now—should push everything aside. And so—Perhaps he had become sharper, colder, harder, than he had ever been, quite ready to sacrifice everything and everybody, or nearly, until he should be the great success he meant to be. But long before this he might have done so much. And he had not—had not until very recently decided to revisit this older, sweeter world.

But in the meantime, as he had long since learned, how the tragedy of her life had been completed. All at once in those earlier years all letters had ceased, and time slipping by—ten years really—he had begun to grow curious. Writing back to a neighbor of hers in Philadelphia in a disguised hand and on nameless paper, he had learned that nearly two years before her father had died and that she and her mother and brother had moved away, the writer could not say where. Then, five years later, when he was becoming truly prosperous, he had learned, through a detective agency, that she and her mother and her ne’er-do-well brother had moved back into this very neighborhood—this old neighborhood of his and hers!—or, rather, a little farther out near the graveyard where their two boys were buried. The simplicity of her! The untutored homing instinct!

But once here, according to what he had learned recently, she and her mother had not prospered at all. They had occupied the most minute of apartments farther out, and had finally been compelled to work in a laundry in their efforts to get along—and he was already so well-to-do, wealthy, really! Indeed three years before his detectives had arrived, her mother had died, and two years after that, she herself, of pneumonia, as had their children. Was it a message from her that had made him worry at that time? Was that why, only six months since, although married and rich and with two daughters by this later marriage, he had not been able to rest until he had found this out, returned here now to see? Did ghosts still stalk the world?

Yes, to-day he had come back here, but only to realize once and for all now how futile this errand was, how cruel he had been, how dreary her latter days must have been in this poor, out-of-the-way corner where once, for a while at least, she had been happy—he and she.

“Been happy!”

“By God,” he suddenly exclaimed, a passion of self-reproach and memory overcoming him, “I can’t stand this! It was not right, not fair. I should not have waited so long. I should have acted long, long since. The cruelty—the evil! There is something cruel and evil in it all, in all wealth, all ambition, in love of fame—too cruel. I must get out! I must think no more—see no more.”

And hurrying to the door and down the squeaking stairs, he walked swiftly back to the costly car that was waiting for him a few blocks below the bridge—that car which was so representative of the realm of so-called power and success of which he was now the master—that realm which, for so long, had taken its meaningless lustre from all that had here preceded it—the misery, the loneliness, the shadow, the despair. And in it he was whirled swiftly and gloomily away.

IX
PHANTOM GOLD

You would have to have seen it to have gathered a true impression—the stubby roughness of the country, the rocks, the poverty of the soil, the poorness of the houses, barns, agricultural implements, horses and cattle and even human beings, in consequence—especially human beings, for why should they, any more than any other product of the soil, flourish where all else was so poor?

It was old Judge Blow who first discovered that “Jack,” or zinc, was the real riches of Taney, if it could be said to have had any before “Jack” was discovered. Months before the boom began he had stood beside a smelter in far-off K—— one late winter afternoon and examined with a great deal of care the ore which the men were smelting, marveling at its resemblance to certain rocks or boulders known as “slug lumps” in his home county.

“What is this stuff?” he asked of one of the bare-armed men who came out from the blazing furnace after a time to wipe his dripping face.

“Zinc,” returned the other, as he passed his huge, soiled palm over his forehead.

“We have stuff down in our county that looks like that,” said the judge as he turned the dull-looking lump over and considered for a while. “I’m sure of it—any amount.” Then he became suddenly silent, for a thought struck him.

“Well, if it’s really ‘Jack,’” said the workman, using the trade or mining name for it, “there’s money in it, all right. This here comes from St. Francis.”

The old judge thought of this for a little while and quietly turned away. He knew where St. Francis was. If this was so valuable that they could ship it all the way from southeast B——, why not from Taney? Had he not many holdings in Taney?

The result was that before long a marked if secret change began to manifest itself in Taney and regions adjacent thereto. Following the private manipulations and goings to and fro of the judge one or two shrewd prospectors appeared, and then after a time the whole land was rife with them. But before that came to pass many a farmer who had remained in ignorance of the value of his holdings was rifled of them.

Old Bursay Queeder, farmer and local ne’er-do-well in the agricultural line, had lived on his particular estate or farm for forty years, and at the time that Judge Blow was thus mysteriously proceeding to and fro and here and there upon the earth, did not know that the rocks against which his pair of extra large feet were being regularly and bitterly stubbed contained the very wealth of which he had been idly and rather wistfully dreaming all his life. Indeed, the earth was a very mysterious thing to Bursay, containing, as it did, everything he really did not know. This collection of seventy acres, for instance—which individually and collectively had wrung more sweat from his brow and more curses from his lips than anything else ever had—contained, unknown to him, the possibility of the fulfilment of all his dreams. But he was old now and a little queer in the head at times, having notions in regard to the Bible, when the world would come to an end, and the like, although still able to contend with nature, if not with man. Each day in the spring and summer and even fall seasons he could be seen on some portion or other of his barren acres, his stubby beard and sparse hair standing out roughly, his fingers like a bird’s claws clutching his plough handles, turning the thin and meagre furrows of his fields and rattling the stony soil, which had long ceased to yield him even a modicum of profit. It was a bare living now which he expected, and a bare living which he received. The house, or cabin, which he occupied with his wife and son and daughter, was dilapidated beyond the use or even need of care. The fences were all decayed save for those which had been built of these same impediments of the soil which he had always considered a queer kind of stone, useless to man or beast—a “hendrance,” as he would have said. His barn was a mere accumulation of patchboards, shielding an old wagon and some few scraps of machinery. And the alleged corn crib was so aged and lopsided that it was ready to fall. Weeds and desolation, bony horses and as bony children, stony fields and thin trees, and withal solitude and occasional want—such was the world of his care and his ruling.

Mrs. Queeder was a fitting mate for the life to which he was doomed. It had come to that pass with her that the monotony of deprivation was accepted with indifference. The absence or remoteness of even a single modest school, meeting house or town hall, to say nothing of convenient neighbors, had left her and hers all but isolated. She was irascible, cantankerous, peculiar; her voice was shrill and her appearance desolate. Queeder, whom she understood or misunderstood thoroughly, was a source of comfort in one way—she could “nag at him,” as he said, and if they quarreled frequently it was in a fitting and harmonious way. Amid such a rattletrap of fields and fences bickering was to be expected.

“Why don’t yuh take them thar slug lumps an’ make a fence over thar?” she asked of Queeder for something like the thousandth time in ten years, referring to as many as thirty-five piles of the best and almost pure zinc lying along the edges of the nearest field, and piled there by Bursay,—this time because two bony cows had invaded one of their corn patches. The “slug lumps” to which she referred could not have been worth less than $2,000.

For as many as the thousandth time he had replied:

“Well, fer the land sakes, hain’t I never got nuthin’ else tuh do? Yuh’d think them thar blame-ding rocks wuz wuth more nor anythin’ else. I do well enough ez ’tis to git ’em outen the sile, I say, ‘thout tryin’ tuh make fences outen ’em.”

“So yuh say—yuh lazy, good-fer-nuthin’ ole tobacco-chewin’ ——,” here a long list of expletives which was usually succeeded by a stove lid or poker or a fair-sized stick of wood, propelled by one party or the other, and which was as deftly dodged. Love and family affection, you see, due to unbroken and unbreakable propinquity, as it were.

But to proceed: The hot and rainy seasons had come and gone in monotonous succession during a period of years, and the lumps still lay in the field. Dode, the eldest child and only son—a huge, hulking, rugged and yet bony ignoramus, who had not inherited an especially delicate or agreeable disposition from his harried parents—might have removed them had he not been a “consarned lazy houn’,” his father said, or like his father, as his mother said, and Jane, the daughter, might have helped, but these two partook of the same depressed indifference which characterized the father. And why not, pray? They had worked long, had had little, seen less and hoped for no particular outlet for their lives in the future, having sense enough to know that if fate had been more kind there might have been. Useless contention with an unyielding soil had done its best at hardening their spirits.

“I don’t see no use ploughin’ the south patch,” Dode had now remarked for the third time this spring. “The blamed thing don’t grow nuthin’.”

“Ef yuh only half ’tended it instid o’ settin’ out thar under them thar junipers pickin’ yer teeth an’ meditatin’, mebbe ’twould,” squeaked Mrs. Queeder, always petulant or angry or waspish—a nature soured by long and hopeless and useless contention.

“No use shakin’ up a lot uv rocks, ez I see,” returned Dode, wearily and aimlessly slapping at a fly. “The hull place ain’t wuth a hill o’ beans,” and from one point of view he was right.

“Why don’t yuh git off’n hit then?” suggested Queeder in a tantalizing voice, with no particular desire to defend the farm, merely with an idle wish to vary the monotony. “Ef hit’s good enough tuh s’port yuh, hit’s good enough to work on, I say.”

“S’port!” sniffed the undutiful Dode, wearily, and yet humorously and scornfully. “I ain’t seed much s’port, ez I kin remember. Mebbe ye’re thinkin’ uv all the fine schoolin’ I’ve had, er the places I’ve been.” He slapped at another fly.

Old Queeder felt the sneer, but as he saw it it was scarcely his fault. He had worked. At the same time he felt the futility of quarreling with Dode, who was younger and stronger and no longer, owing to many family quarrels, bearing him any filial respect. As a matter of fact it was the other way about. From having endured many cuffs and blows in his youth Dode was now much the more powerful physically, and in any contest could easily outdo his father; and Queeder, from at first having ruled and seen his word law, was now compelled to take second, even third and fourth, place, and by contention and all but useless snarling gain the very little consideration that he received.

But in spite of all this they lived together indifferently. And day after day—once Judge Blow had returned to Taney—time was bringing nearer and nearer the tide of mining and the amazing boom that went with it. Indeed every day, like a gathering storm cloud, it might have been noted by the sensitive as approaching closer and closer, only these unwitting holders were not sensitive. They had not the slightest inkling as yet of all that was to be. Here in this roadless, townless region how was one to know. Prospectors passed to the north and the south of them; but as yet none had ever come directly to this wonderful patch upon which Queeder and his family rested. It was in too out-of-the-way a place—a briary, woodsy, rocky corner.

Then one sunny June morning—

“Hi, thar!” called Cal Arnold, their next neighbor, who lived some three miles further on, who now halted his rickety wagon and bony horses along the road opposite the field in which Queeder was working. “Hyur the news?” He spoke briskly, shifting his cud of tobacco and eyeing Queeder with the chirpiness of one who brings diverting information.

“No; what?” asked Queeder, ceasing his “cultivating” with a worn one-share plough and coming over and leaning on his zinc fence, rubbing a hand through his sparse hair the while.

“Ol’ Dunk Porter down here to Newton’s sold his farm,” replied Cal, shrewdly and jubilantly, as though he were relating the tale of a great battle or the suspected approach of the end of the world. “An’ he got three thousan’ dollars fer it.” He rolled the sum deliciously under his tongue.

“Yuh don’t say!” said Queeder quietly but with profound and amazed astonishment. “Three thousan’?” He stirred as one who hears of the impossible being accomplished and knows it can’t be true. “Whut fer?”

“They ’low now ez how thar’s min’l onto it,” went on the farmer wisely. “They ’low ez how now this hyur hull kentry round hyur is thick an’ spilin’ with it. Hit’s uvrywhar. They tell me ez how these hyur slug lumps”—and he flicked at one of the large piles of hitherto worthless zinc against which Queeder was leaning—“is this hyur min’l—er ‘Jack,’ ez they call hit—an’ that hit’s wuth two cents a pound when it’s swelted” (“smelted,” he meant) “an’ even more. I see yuh got quite a bit uv hit. So’ve I. Thar’s a lot layin’ down around my place. I allus ’lowed ez how ’twant wuth much o’ anythin,’ but they say ’tis. I hyur from some o’ the boys ’at’s been to K—— that when hit’s fixed up, swelted and like o’ that, that hit’s good fer lots of things.”

He did not know what exactly, so he did not stop to explain. Instead he cocked a dreamful eye, screwed up his mouth preparatory to expectorating and looked at Queeder. The latter, unable to adjust his thoughts to this new situation, picked up a piece of the hitherto despised “slug” and looked at it. To think that through all these years of toil and suffering he should have believed it worthless and now all of a sudden it was worth two cents a pound when “swelted” and that neighbors were beginning to sell their farms for princely sums!—and his farm was covered with this stuff, this gold almost! Why, there were whole hummocks of it raising slaty-gray backs to the hot sun further on, a low wall in one place where it rose sheer out of the ground on this “prupetty,” as he always referred to it. Think of that! Think of that! But although he thought much he said nothing, for in his starved and hungry brain was beginning to sprout and flourish a great and wondrous idea. He was to have money, wealth—ease, no less! Think of it! Not to toil and sweat in the summer sun any more, to loaf and dream at his ease, chew all the tobacco he wished, live in town, visit far-off, mysterious K——, see all there was to see!

“Well, I guess I’ll be drivin’ on,” commented Arnold after a time, noting Queeder’s marked abstraction. “I cal’late tuh git over tuh Bruder’s an’ back by sundown. He’s got a little hay I traded him a pig fer hyur a while back,” and he flicked his two bony horses and was off up the rubbly, dusty road.

For a time Queeder was scarcely satisfied to believe his senses. Was it really true? Had Porter really sold his place? For days thereafter, although he drove to Arno—sixteen miles away—to discover the real truth, he held his own counsel, nursing a wonderful fancy. This property was his, not his wife’s, nor his two children’s. Years before he had worked and paid for it, a few lone dollars at a time, or their equivalent in corn, pigs, wheat, before he had married. Now—now—soon one of those strange creatures—a “prowspector,” Arnold had called him—who went about with money would come along and buy up his property. Wonderful! Wonderful! What would he get for it?—surely five thousand dollars, considering that Porter had received three for forty acres, whereas he had seventy. Four thousand, anyhow—a little more than Dunk. He could not figure it very well, but it would be more than Dunk’s, whatever it was—probably five thousand!

The one flaw in all this though—and it was a great flaw—was the thought of his savage and unkindly family—the recalcitrant Dode, the angular Jane and his sour better half, Emma—who would now probably have to share in all this marvelous prosperity, might even take it away from him and push him into that background where he had been for so long. They were so much more dogmatic, forceful than he. He was getting old, feeble even, from long years of toil. His wife had done little this long time but sneer and jeer at him, as he now chose most emphatically to remember; his savage son the same. Jane, the indifferent, who looked on him as a failure and a ne’er-do-well, had done nothing but suggest that he work harder. Love, family tenderness, family unity—if these had ever existed they had long since withered in the thin, unnourishing air of this rough, poverty-stricken world. What did he owe any of them? Nothing. And now they would want to share in all this, of course. Having lived so long with them, and under such disagreeable conditions, he now wondered how they would dare suggest as much, and still he knew they would. Fight him, nag him, that’s all they had ever done. But now that wealth was at his door they would be running after him, fawning upon him—demanding it of him, perhaps! What should he do? How arrange for all of this?—for wealth was surely close to his hands. It must be. Like a small, half-intelligent rat he peeked and perked. His demeanor changed to such an extent that even his family noticed it and began to wonder, although (knowing nothing of all that had transpired as yet) they laid it to the increasing queerness of age.

“Have yuh noticed how Pap acts these hyur days?” Dode inquired of Jane and his mother one noontime after old Queeder had eaten and returned to the fields. “He’s all the time standin’ out thar at the fence lookin’ aroun’ ez if he wuz a-waitin’ fer somebody er thinkin’ about somepin. Mebbe he’s gittin’ a little queer, huh? Y’ think so?”

Dode was most interested in anything which concerned his father—or, rather, his physical or mental future—for once he died this place would have to be divided or he be called upon to run it, and in that case he would be a fitting catch for any neighborhood farming maiden, and as such able to broach and carry through the long-cherished dream of matrimony, now attenuated and made all but impossible by the grinding necessities he was compelled to endure.

“Yes, I’ve been noticin’ somepin,” returned Mrs. Queeder. “He hain’t the same ez he wuz a little while back. Some new notion he’s got into his mind, I reckon, somepin he wants tuh do an’ kain’t, er somepin new in ’ligion, mebbe. Yuh kain’t ever tell whut’s botherin’ him.”

Jane “’lowed” as much and the conversation ended. But still Queeder brooded, trying to solve the knotty problem, which depended, of course, on the open or secret sale of the land—secret, if possible, he now finally decided, seeing that his family had always been so unkind to him. They deserved nothing better. It was his—why not?

In due time appeared a prospector, mounted on horseback and dressed for rough travel, who, looking over the fields of this area and noting the value of these particular acres, the surface outcropping of a thick vein, became intensely interested. Queeder was not to be seen at the time, having gone to some remote portion of the farm, but Mrs. Queeder, wholly ignorant of the value of the land and therefore of the half-suppressed light in the stranger’s eye, greeted him pleasantly enough.

“Would you let me have a drink of water?” inquired the stranger when she appeared at the door.

“Sartinly,” she replied with a tone of great respect. Even comparatively well-dressed strangers were so rare here.

Old Queeder in a distant field observing him at the well, now started for the house.

“What is that stuff you make your fences out of?” asked the stranger agreeably, wondering if they knew.

“Well, now, I dunno,” said Mrs. Queeder. “It’s some kind o’ stone, I reckon—slug lumps, we uns always call hit aroun’ hyur.”

The newcomer suppressed a desire to smile and stooped to pick up a piece of the zinc with which the ground was scattered. It was the same as he had seen some miles back, only purer and present in much greater quantities. Never had he seen more and better zinc near the surface. It was lying everywhere exposed, cultivation, frosts and rains having denuded it, whereas in the next county other men were digging for it. The sight of these dilapidated holdings, the miserable clothing, old Queeder toiling out in the hot fields, and all this land valueless for agriculture because of its wondrous mineral wealth, was almost too much for him.

“Do you own all this land about here?” he inquired.

“’Bout seventy acres,” returned Mrs. Queeder.

“Do you know what it sells at an acre?”

“No. It ain’t wuth much, though, I reckon. I ain’t heerd o’ none bein’ sold aroun’ hyur fer some time now.”

The prospector involuntarily twitched at the words “not wuth much.” What would some of his friends and rivals say if they knew of this particular spot? What if some one should tell these people? If he could buy it now for a song, as he well might! Already other prospectors were in the neighborhood. Had he not eaten at the same table at Arno with three whom he suspected as such? He must get this, and get it now.

“I guess I’ll stroll over and talk to your husband a moment,” he remarked and ambled off, the while Mrs. Queeder and Jane, the twain in loose blue gingham bags of dresses much blown by the wind, stood in the tumbledown doorway and looked after him.

“Funny, ain’t he?” said the daughter. “Wonder whut he wants o’ Paw?”

Old Queeder looked up quizzically from his ploughing, to which he had returned, as he saw the stranger approaching, and now surveyed him doubtfully as he offered a cheery “Good morning.”

“Do you happen to know if there is any really good farming land around here for sale?” inquired the prospector after a few delaying comments about the weather.

“Air yuh wantin’ it fer farmin’?” replied Queeder cynically and casting a searching look upon the newcomer, who saw at once by Queeder’s eye that he knew more than his wife. “They’re buyin’ hit now mostly fer the min’l ez is onto it, ez I hyur.” At the same time he perked like a bird to see how this thrust had been received.

The prospector smiled archly if wisely. “I see,” he said. “You think it’s good for mining, do you? What would you hold your land at as mineral land then if you had a chance to sell it?”

Queeder thought for a while. Two wood doves cooed mournfully in the distance and a blackbird squeaked rustily before he answered.

“I dunno ez I keer tuh sell yit.” He had been getting notions of late as to what might be done if he were to retain his land, bid it up against the desires of one and another, only also the thought of how his wife and children might soon learn and insist on dividing the profits with him if he did sell it was haunting him. Those dreams of getting out in the world and seeing something, of getting away from his family and being happy in some weird, free way, were actually torturing him.

“Who owns the land just below here, then?” asked the stranger, realizing that his idea of buying for little or nothing might as well be abandoned. But at this Queeder winced. For after all, the land adjoining had considerable mineral on it also, as he well knew.

“Why, let me see,” he replied waspishly, with mingled feelings of opposition and indifference. “Marradew,” he finally added, grudgingly. It was no doubt true that this stranger or some other could buy of other farmers if he refused to sell. Still, land around here anywhere must be worth something, his as much as any other. If Dunk Porter had received $3,000—

“If you don’t want to sell, I suppose he might,” the prospector continued pleasantly. The idea was expressed softly, meditatively, indifferently almost.

There was a silence, in which Queeder calmly leaned on his plough handles thinking. The possibility of losing this long-awaited opportunity was dreadful. But he was not floored yet, for all his hunger and greed. Arnold had said that the metal alone, these rocks, was worth two cents a pound, and he could not get it out of his mind that somehow the land itself, the space of soil aside from the metal, must be worth something. How could it be otherwise? Small crops of sorts grew on it.

“I dunno,” he replied defiantly, if internally weakly. “Yuh might ast. I ain’t heerd o’ his wantin’ to sell.” He was determined to risk this last if he had to run after the stranger afterward and beg him to compromise, although he hoped not to have to do that, either. There were other prospectors.

“I don’t know yet whether I want this,” continued the prospector heavily and with an air of profound indifference, “but I’d like to have an option on it, if you’d like to sell. What’ll you take for an option at sixty days on the entire seventy acres?”

The worn farmer did not in the least understand what was meant by the word option, but he was determined not to admit it. “Whut’ll yuh give?” he asked finally, in great doubt as to what to say.

“Well, how about $200 down and $5,000 more at the end of sixty days if we come to terms at the end of that time?” He was offering the very lowest figure that he imagined Queeder would take, if any, for he had heard of other sales in this vicinity this very day.

Queeder, not knowing what an option was, knew not what to say. Five thousand was what he had originally supposed he might be offered, but sixty days! What did he mean by that? Why not at once if he wanted the place—cash—as Dunk Porter, according to Arnold, had received? He eyed the stranger feverishly, fidgeted with his plough handles, and finally observed almost aimlessly: “I ’low ez I could git seven thousan’ any day ef I wanted to wait. The feller hyur b’low me a ways got three thousan’, an’ he’s got thirty acres less’n I got. Thar’s been a feller aroun’ hyur offerin’ me six thousan’.”

“Well, I might give you $6,000, providing I found the ground all right,” he said.

“Cash down?” asked Queeder amazedly, kicking at a clod.

“Within sixty days,” answered the prospector.

“Oh!” said Queeder, gloomily. “I thort yuh wanted tuh buy t’day.”

“Oh, no,” said the other. “I said an option. If we come to terms I’ll be back here with the money within sixty days or before, and we’ll close the thing up—six thousand in cash, minus the option money. Of course I don’t bind myself absolutely to buy—just get the privilege of buying at any time within sixty days, and if I don’t come back within that time the money I turn over to you to-day is yours, see, and you’re free to sell the land to some one else.”

“Huh!” grunted Queeder. He had dreamed of getting the money at once and making off all by himself, but here was this talk of sixty days, which might mean something or nothing.

“Well,” said the prospector, noting Queeder’s dissatisfaction and deciding that he must do something to make the deal seem more attractive, “suppose we say seven thousand, then, and I put down $500 cash into your hands now? How’s that? Seven thousand in sixty days and five hundred in cash right now. What do you say?”

He reached in his pocket and extracted a wallet thick with bills, which excited Queeder greatly. Never had so much ready money, which he might quickly count as his if he chose, been so near him. After all, $500 in cash was an amazing amount in itself. With that alone what could he not do? And then the remainder of the seven thousand within sixty days! Only, there were his wife and two children to consider. If he was to carry out his dream of decamping there must be great secrecy. If they learned of this—his possession of even so much as five hundred in cash—what might not happen? Would not Dode or his wife or Jane, or all three, take it away from him—steal it while he was asleep? It might well be so. He was so silent and puzzled that the stranger felt that he was going to reject his offer.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said, as though he were making a grand concession. “I’ll make it eight thousand and put up eight hundred. How’s that? If we can’t arrange it on that basis we’ll have to drop the matter, for I can’t offer to pay any more,” and at that he returned the wallet to his pocket.

But Queeder still gazed, made all but dumb by his good fortune and the difficulties it presented. Eight thousand! Eight hundred in cash down! He could scarcely understand.

“T’day?” he asked.

“Yes, to-day—only you’ll have to come with me to Arno. I want to look into your title. Maybe you have a deed, though—have you?”

Queeder nodded.

“Well, if it’s all right I’ll pay you the money at once. I have a form of agreement here and we can get some one to witness it, I suppose. Only we’ll have to get your wife to sign, too.”

Queeder’s face fell. Here was the rub—his wife and two children! “She’s gotta sign, hez she?” he inquired grimly, sadly even. He was beside himself with despair, disgust. To work and slave so all these years! Then, when a chance came, to have it all come to nothing, or nearly so!

“Yes,” said the prospector, who saw by his manner and tone that his wife’s knowledge of it was not desired. “We’ll have to get her signature, too. I’m sorry if it annoys you, but the law compels it. Perhaps you could arrange all that between you in some way. Why not go over and talk to her about it?”

Queeder hesitated. How he hated it—this sharing with his wife and son! He didn’t mind Jane so much. But now if they heard of it they would quarrel with him and want the larger share. He would have to fight—stand by his “rights.” And once he had the money—if he ever got it—he would have to watch it, hide it, to keep it away from them.

“What’s the matter?” asked the prospector, noting his perturbation. “Does she object to your selling?”

“’Tain’t that. She’ll sell, well enough, once she hyurs. I didn’t ’low ez I’d let ’er know at fust. She’ll be wantin’ the most uv it—her an’ Dode—an’ hit ain’t ther’n, hit’s mine. I wuz on hyur fust. I owned this hyur place fust, ’fore ever I saw ’er. She don’t do nuthin’ but fuss an’ fight, ez ’tis.”

“Supposing we go over to the house and talk to her. She may not be unreasonable. She’s only entitled to a third, you know, if you don’t want to give her more than that. That’s the law. That would leave you nearly five thousand. In fact, if you want it, I’ll see that you get five thousand whatever she gets.” He had somehow gathered the impression that five thousand, for himself, meant a great deal to Queeder.

And true enough, at that the old farmer brightened a little. For five thousand? Was not that really more than he had expected to get for the place as a whole but an hour before! And supposing his wife did get three thousand? What of it? Was not his own dream coming true? He agreed at once and decided to accompany the prospector to the house. But on the way the farmer paused and gazed about him. He was as one who scarcely knew what he was doing. All this money—this new order of things—if it went through! He felt strange, different, confused. The mental ills of his many years plus this great fortune with its complications and possibilities were almost too much for him. The stranger noted a queer metallic and vacant light in the old farmer’s eyes as he now turned slowly about from west to east, staring.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, a suspicion of insanity coming to him.

The old man seemed suddenly to come to. “’Tain’t nuthin’,” he said. “I wuz just thinkin’.”

The prospector meditated on the validity of a contract made with a lunatic, but the land was too valuable to bother about trifles. Once a contract was made, even with a half-wit, the legal difficulties which could be made over any attempt to break the agreement would be very great.

In the old cabin Jane and her mother wondered at the meaning of the approaching couple, but old Queeder shooed off the former as he would have a chicken. Once inside the single room, which served as parlor, sitting-room, bedroom and all else convenient, Queeder nervously closed the door leading into the kitchen, where Jane had retired.

“Go on away, now,” he mumbled, as he saw her there hanging about. “We want a word with yer Maw, I tell yuh.”

Lank Jane retired, but later clapped a misshapen ear to the door until she was driven away by her suspicious father. Then the farmer began to explain to his wife what it was all about.

“This hyur stranger—I don’t know your name yit—”

“Crawford! Crawford!” put in the prospector.

“Crawford—Mr. Crawford—is hyur tuh buy the place ef he kin. I thought, seein’ ez how yuh’ve got a little int’est in it—third”—he was careful to add—“we’d better come an’ talk tuh yuh.”

“Int’est!” snapped Mrs. Queeder, sharply and suspiciously, no thought of the presence of the stranger troubling her in her expression of her opinion, “I should think I had—workin’ an’ slavin’ on it fer twenty-four year! Well, whut wuz yuh thinkin’ uv payin’ fer the place?” she asked of the stranger sharply.

A nervous sign from Queeder, whose acquisitiveness was so intense that it was almost audible, indicated that he was not to say.

“Well, now what do you think it would be worth?”

“Dunno ez I kin say exackly,” replied the wife slyly and greedily, imagining that Queeder, because of his age and various mental deficiencies was perhaps leaving these negotiations to her. “Thar’s ben furms aroun’ hyur ez big’s this sold fer nigh onto two thousan’ dollars.” She was quoting the topmost figure of which she had ever heard.

“Well, that’s pretty steep, isn’t it?” asked Crawford solemnly but refusing to look at Queeder. “Ordinarily land around here is not worth much more than twenty dollars an acre and you have only seventy, as I understand.”

“Yes, but this hyur land ain’t so pore ez some, nuther,” rejoined Mrs. Queeder, forgetting her original comment on it and making the best argument she could for it. “Thar’s a spring on this hyur one, just b’low the house hyur.”

“Yes,” said Crawford, “I saw it as I came in. It has some value. So you think two thousand is what it’s worth, do you?” He looked at Queeder wisely, as much as to say, “This is a good joke, Queeder.”

Mrs. Queeder, fairly satisfied that hers was to be the dominant mind in this argument, now turned to her husband for counsel. “What do yuh think, Bursay?” she asked.

Queeder, shaken by his duplicity, his fear of discovery, his greed and troublesome dreams, gazed at her nervously. “I sartinly think hit’s wuth that much anyhow.”

Crawford now began to explain that he only wanted an option on it at present, an agreement to sell within a given time, and if this were given, a paper signed, he would pay a few dollars to bind the bargain—and at this he looked wisely at Queeder and half closed one eye, by which the latter understood that he was to receive the sum originally agreed upon.

“If you say so we’ll close this right now,” he said ingratiatingly, taking from his pockets a form of agreement and opening it. “I’ll just fill this in and you two can sign it.” He went to the worn poplar table and spread out his paper, the while Queeder and his wife eyed the proceeding with intense interest. Neither could read or write but the farmer, not knowing how he was to get his eight hundred, could only trust to the ingenuity of the prospector to solve the problem. Besides, both were hypnotized by the idea of selling this worthless old land so quickly and for so much, coming into possession of actual money, and moved and thought like people in a dream. Mrs. Queeder’s eyelids had narrowed to thin, greedy lines.

“How much did yuh cal’late yuh’d give tuh bind this hyur?” she inquired tensely and with a feverish gleam in her eye.

“Oh,” said the stranger, who was once more looking at Queeder with an explanatory light in his eye, “about a hundred dollars, I should say. Wouldn’t that be enough?”

A hundred dollars! Even that sum in this lean world was a fortune. To Mrs. Queeder, who knew nothing of the value of the mineral on the farm, it was unbelievable, an unexplainable windfall, an augury of better things. And besides, the two thousand to come later! But now came the question of a witness and how the paper was to be signed. The prospector, having filled in (in pencil) a sample acknowledgment of the amount paid—$100—and then having said, “Now you sign here, Mr. Queeder,” the latter replied, “But I kain’t write an’ nuther kin my wife.”

“Thar wuzn’t much chance fer schoolin’ around’ hyur when I wuz young,” simpered his better half.

“Well then, we’ll just have to let you make your marks, and get some one to witness them. Can your son or daughter write?”

Here was a new situation and one most unpleasant to both, for Dode, once called, would wish to rule, being so headstrong and contrary. He could write his name anyhow, read a little bit also—but did they want him to know yet? Husband and wife looked at each dubiously and with suspicion. What now? The difficulty was solved by the rumble of a wagon on the nearby road.

“Maybe that is some one who could witness for you?” suggested Crawford.

Queeder looked out. “Yes, I b’lieve he kin write,” he commented. “Hi, thar, Lester!” he called. “Come in hyur a minute! We wantcha fer somepin.”

The rumbling ceased and in due time one Lester Botts, a farmer, not so much better in appearance than Queeder, arrived at the door. The prospector explained what was wanted and the agreement was eventually completed, only Botts, not knowing of the mineral which Queeder’s acres represented, was anxious to tell the prospector of better land than this, from an agricultural view, which could be had for less money, but he did not know how to go about it. Before she would sign, Mrs. Queeder made it perfectly clear where she stood in the matter.

“I git my sheer uv this hyur money now, don’t I,” she demanded, “paid tuh me right hyur?”

Crawford, uncertain as to Queeder’s wishes in this, looked at him; and he, knowing his wife’s temper and being moved by greed, exclaimed, “Yuh don’t git nuthin’ ’ceptin’ I die. Yuh ain’t entitled tuh no sheer unless’n we’re separatin’, which we hain’t.”

“Then I don’t sign nuthin’,” said Mrs. Queeder truculently.

“Of course I don’t want to interfere,” commented the prospector, soothingly, “but I should think you’d rather give her her share of this—thirty-three dollars,” he eyed Queeder persuasively—“and then possibly a third of the two thousand—that’s only six hundred and sixty—rather than stop the sale now, wouldn’t you? You’ll have to agree to do something like that. It’s a good bargain. There ought to be plenty for everybody.”

The farmer hearkened to the subtlety of this. After all, six hundred and sixty out of eight thousand was not so much. Rather than risk delay and discovery he pretended to soften, and finally consented. The marks were made and their validity attested by Botts, the one hundred in cash being counted out in two piles, according to Mrs. Queeder’s wish, and the agreement pocketed. Then the prospector accompanied by Mr. Botts, was off—only Queeder, following and delaying him, was finally handed over in secret the difference between the hundred and the sum originally agreed upon. When he saw all the money the old farmer’s eyes wiggled as if magnetically operated. Trembling with the agony of greed he waited, and then his hard and knotted fingers closed upon the bills like the claws of a gripping hawk.

“Thank yuh,” he said aloud. “Thank yuh,” and he jerked doorward in distress. “See me alone fust when yuh come ag’in. We gotta be mighty keerful er she’ll find out, an’ ef she does she’ll not sign nuthin’, an’ raise ol’ Harry, too.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” replied the prospector archly. He was thinking how easy it would be, in view of all the dishonesty and chicanery already practised, to insist that the two thousand written in in pencil was the actual sale price and efface old Queeder by threatening to expose his duplicity. However, there were sixty days yet in which to consider this. “In sixty days, maybe less, I’ll show up.” And he slipped gracefully away, leaving the old earth-scraper to brood alone.

But all was not ended with the payment of this sum, as any one might have foretold. For Dode and Jane, hearing after a little while from their mother of the profitable sale of the land, were intensely moved. Money—any money, however small in amount—conjured up visions of pleasure and ease, and who was to get it, after all the toil here on the part of all? Where was their share in all this? They had worked, too. They demanded it in repeated ways, but to no avail. Their mother and father were obdurate, insisting that they wait until the sale was completed before any further consideration was given the matter.

While they were thus arguing, however, quarreling over even so small a sum as $100, as they thought, a new complication was added by Dode learning, as he soon did, that this was all mineral land, that farms were being sold in Adair—the next township—and even here; that it was rumored that Queeder had already sold his land for $5,000, and that if he had he had been beaten, for the land was worth much more—$200 an acre even, or $14,000. At once he suspected his father and mother of some treachery in connection with the sale—that there had been no option given, but a genuine sale made, and that Queeder or his mother, or both, were concealing a vast sum from himself and Jane. An atmosphere of intense suspicion and evil will was at once introduced.

“They’ve sold the furm fer $5,000 ’stid uv $2,000; that’s whut they’ve gone an’ done,” insisted Dode one day to Jane in the presence of his father and mother. “Ev’rybody aroun’ hyur knows now what this hyur land’s wuth, an’ that’s whut they got, yuh kin bet.”

“Yuh lie!” shrieked Queeder shrilly, who was at once struck by the fact that if what Dode said was true he had walked into a financial as well as a moral trap from which he could not well extricate himself. “I hain’t sold nuthin’,” he went on angrily. “Lester Botts wuz hyur an’ seed whut we done. He signed onto it.”

“Ef the land’s wuth more’n $2,000, that feller ’twuz hyur didn’ agree tuh pay no more’n that fer it in hyur,” put in Mrs. Queeder explanatorily, although, so little did she trust her husband, she was now beginning to wonder if there might not have been some secret agreement between him and this stranger. “Ef he had any different talk with yer Paw,” and here she eyed old Queeder suspiciously, beginning to recall the prospector’s smooth airs and ways, “he didn’ say nuthin’ ’bout it tuh me. I do rec’leck yer Paw’n him talkin’ over by the fence yander near an hour afore they come in hyur. I wondered then whut it wuz about.” She was beginning to worry as to how she was to get more seeing that the price agreed upon was now, apparently, inconsequential.

And as for Dode, he now eyed his father cynically and suspiciously. “I cal’late he got somepin more fer it than he’s tellin’ us about,” he insisted. “They ain’t sellin’ land down to Arno right now fer no $200 an acre an’ him not knowin’ it—an’ land not ez good ez this, nuther. Ye’re hidin’ the money whut yuh got fer it, that’s whut!”

Mrs. Queeder, while greatly disturbed as to the possibility of duplicity on her husband’s part in connection with all this, still considered it policy to call Heaven to witness that in her case at least no duplicity was involved. If more had been offered or paid she knew nothing of it. For his part Queeder boiled with fear, rage, general opposition to all of them and their share in this.

“Yuh consarned varmint!” he squealed, addressing Dode and leaping to his feet and running for a stick of stovewood, “I’ll show yuh whuther we air er not! Yuh ’low I steal, do yuh?”

Dode intercepted him, however, and being the stronger, pushed him off. It was always so easy so to do—much to Queeder’s rage. He despised his son for his triumphant strength alone, to say nothing of his dour cynicism in regard to himself. The argument was ended by the father being put out of the house and the mother pleading volubly that in so far as she knew it was all as she said, that in signing the secret agreement with her husband she had meant no harm to her children, but only to protect them and herself.

But now, brooding over the possibility of Queeder’s deception, she began to lay plans for his discomfiture in any way that she might—she and Dode and Jane. Queeder himself raged secretly between fear and hatred of Dode and what might follow because of his present knowledge. How was he to prevent Dode from being present at the final transaction, and if so how would the secret difference be handed him? Besides, if he took the sum mentioned, how did he know that he was not now being overreached? Every day nearly brought new rumors of new sales at better prices than he had been able to fix. In addition, each day Mrs. Queeder cackled like an irritable hen over the possible duplicity of her husband, although that creature in his secretive greed and queerness was not to be encompassed. He fought shy of the house the greater part of each day, jerked like a rat at every sound or passing stranger and denied himself words to speak or explain, or passed the lie if they pressed him too warmly. The seven hundred extra he had received was wrapped in paper and hidden in a crevice back of a post in the barn, a tin can serving as an outer protection for his newly acquired wealth. More than once during the day he returned to that spot, listened and peeked before he ventured to see whether it was still safe.

Indeed, there was something deadly in the household order from now on, little short of madness in fact, for now mother and children schemed for his downfall while all night long old Queeder wakened, jerking in the blackness and listening for any sounds which might be about the barn. On more than one occasion he changed the hiding place, even going so far as to keep the money on his person for a time. Once he found an old rusty butcher knife and, putting that in his shirt bosom, he slept with it and dreamed of trouble.

Into the heart of this walked another prospector one morning rejoicing, like the first one, at his find. Like all good business men he was concerned to see the owner only and demanded that Queeder be called.

“Oh, Paw!” called Jane from the rickety doorway. “Thar’s some one hyur wants tuh see yuh!”

Old Queeder looked warily up from his hot field, where he had been waiting these many days, and beheld the stranger. He dropped his weed fighting and came forward. Dode drifted in from somewhere.

“Pretty dry weather we’re having, isn’t it?” remarked the stranger pleasantly meeting him halfway in his approach.

“Yes,” he replied vacantly, for he was very, very much worn these days, mentally and physically. “It’s tol’able dry! Tol-able dry!” He wiped his leathery brow with his hand.

“You don’t know of any one about here, do you, who has any land for sale?”

“Ye’re another one uv them min’l prowspecters, I projeck, eh?” inquired Queeder, now quite openly. There was no need to attempt to conceal that fact any longer.

The newcomer was taken aback, for he had not expected so much awareness in this region so soon. “I am,” he said frankly.

“I thought so,” said Queeder.

“Have you ever thought of selling the land here?” he inquired.

“Well, I dunno,” began the farmer shrewdly. “Thar’ve been fellers like yuh aroun’ hyar afore now lookin’ at the place. Whut do yuh cal-late it might be wuth tuh yuh?” He eyed him sharply the while they strolled still further away from the spot where Dode, Jane and the mother formed an audience in the doorway.

The prospector ambled about the place examining the surface lumps, so very plentiful everywhere.

“This looks like fairly good land to me,” he said quietly after a time. “You haven’t an idea how much you’d want an acre for it, have you?”

“Well, I hyur they’re gettin’ ez much ez three hundred down to Arno,” replied Queeder, exaggerating fiercely. Now that a second purchaser had appeared he was eager to learn how much more, if any, than the original offer would be made.

“Yes—well, that’s a little steep, don’t you think, considering the distance the metal would have to be hauled to the railroad? It’ll cost considerable to get it over there.”

“Not enough, I ’low, tuh make it wuth much less’n three hundred, would it?” observed Queeder, sagely.

“Well, I don’t know about that. Would you take two hundred an acre for as much as forty acres of it?”

Old Queeder pricked his ears at the sound of bargain. As near as he could figure, two hundred an acre for forty acres would bring him as much as he was now to get for the entire seventy, and he would still have thirty to dispose of. The definiteness of the proposition thrilled him, boded something large for his future—eight thousand for forty, and all he could wring from the first comer had been eight thousand for seventy!

“Huh!” he said, hanging on the argument with ease and leisure. “I got an offer uv a option on the hull uv it fer twelve thousan’ now.”

“What!” said the stranger, surveying him critically. “Have you signed any papers in the matter?”

Queeder looked at him for the moment as if he suspected treachery, and then seeing the gathered family surveying them from the distant doorway he made the newcomer a cabalistic sign.

“Come over hyur,” he said, leading off to a distant fence. At the safe distance they halted. “I tell yuh just how ’tis,” he observed very secretively. “Thar wuz a feller come along hyur three er four weeks ago an’ at that time I didn’t know ez how this hyur now wuz min’l, see? An’ he ast me, ’thout sayin’ nuthin’ ez tuh whut he knowed, whut I’d take for it, acre fer acre. Well, thar wuz anuther feller, a neighbor o’ mine, had been along hyur an’ he wuz sayin’ ez how a piece o’ land just below, about forty acres, wuz sold fer five thousan’ dollars. Seein’ ez how my land wuz the same kind o’ land, only better, I ’lowed ez how thar bein’ seventy acres hyur tuh his forty I oughta git nearly twicet ez much, an’ I said so. He didn’t ’low ez I ought at fust, but later on he kind o’ come roun’ an’ we agreed ez how I bein’ the one that fust had the place—I wuz farmin’ hyur ’fore ever I married my wife—that ef any sale wuz made I orter git the biggest sheer. So we kind o’ fixed it up b’tween us, quiet-like an’ not lettin’ anybody else know, that when it come tuh makin’ out the papers an’ sich at the end uv the sixty days he was to gimme a shade the best o’ the money afore we signed any papers. Course I wouldn’t do nuthin’ like that ef the place hadn’t b’longed tuh me in the fust place, an’ ef me an’ my wife an’ chil’n got along ez well’s we did at fust, but she’s allers a-fightin’ an’ squallin’. Ef he come back hyur, ez he ’lowed he would, I wuz t’ have eight thousan’ fer myself, an’ me an’ my wife wuzta divide the rest b’tween us ez best we could, her to have her third, ez the law is.”

The stranger listened with mingled astonishment, amusement and satisfaction at the thought that the contract, if not exactly illegal, could at least to Queeder be made to appear so. For an appeal to the wife must break it, and besides because of the old man’s cupidity he might easily be made to annul the original agreement. For plainly even now this farmer did not know the full value of all that he had so foolishly bartered away. About him were fields literally solid with zinc under the surface. Commercially $60,000 would be a mere bagatelle to give for it, when the East was considered. One million dollars would be a ridiculously low capitalization for a mine based on this property. A hundred thousand might well be his share for his part in the transaction. Good heavens, the other fellow had bought a fortune for a song! It was only fair to try to get it away from him.

“I’ll tell you how this is, Mr. Queeder,” he said after a time. “It looks to me as though this fellow, whoever he is, has given you a little the worst end of this bargain. Your land is worth much more than that, that’s plain enough. But you can get out of that easily enough on the ground that you really didn’t know what you were selling at the time you made this bargain. That’s the law, I believe. You don’t have to stick by an agreement if it’s made when you don’t understand what you’re doing. As a matter of fact, I think I could get you out of it if you wanted me to. All you would have to do would be to refuse to sign any other papers when the time comes and return the money that’s been paid you. Then when the time came I would be glad to take over your whole farm at three hundred dollars an acre and pay cash down. That would make you a rich man. I’d give you three thousand cash in hand the day you signed an agreement to sell. The trouble is you were just taken in. You and your wife really didn’t know what you were doing.”

“That’s right,” squeaked Queeder, “we wuz. We didn’t ’low ez they wuz any min’l on this when we signed that air contrack.”

Three hundred dollars an acre, as he dumbly figured it out, meant $21,000—twenty-one instead of a wretched eight thousand! For the moment he stood there quite lost as to what to do, say, think, a wavering, element-worn figure. His bent and shriveled body, raked and gutted by misfortune, fairly quivered with the knowledge that riches were really his for the asking, yet also that now, owing to his early error and ignorance in regard to all this, he might not be able to arrange for their reception. His seared and tangled brain, half twisted by solitude, balanced unevenly with the weight of this marvelous possibility. It crossed the wires of his mind and made him see strabismically.

The prospector, uncertain as to what his silence indicated, added: “I might even do a little better than that, Mr. Queeder—say, twenty-five thousand. You could have a house in the city for that. Your wife could wear silk dresses; you yourself need never do another stroke of work; your son and daughter could go to college if they wanted to. All you have to do is to refuse to sign that deed when he comes back—hand him the money or get his address and let me send it to him.”

“He swindled me, so he did!” Queeder almost shouted now, great beads of sweat standing out upon his brow. “He tried tuh rob me! He shan’t have an acre, by God—not an acre!”

“That’s right,” said the newcomer, and before he left he again insinuated into the farmer’s mind the tremendous and unfair disproportion between twelve (as he understood Queeder was receiving) and twenty-five thousand. He pictured the difference in terms of city or town opportunities, the ease of his future life.

Unfortunately, the farmer possessed no avenue by which to escape from his recent duplicity. Having deceived his wife and children over so comparatively small a sum as eight thousand, this immensely greater sum offered many more difficulties—bickering, quarreling, open fighting, perhaps, so fierce were Dode and his wife in their moods, before it could be attained. And was he equal to it? At the same time, although he had never had anything, he was now feeling as though he had lost a great deal, as if some one were endeavoring to take something immense away from him, something which he had always had!

During the days that followed he brooded over this, avoiding his family as much as possible, while they, wondering when the first prospector would return and what conversation or arrangement Queeder had had with the second, watched him closely. At last he was all but unbalanced mentally, and by degrees his mind came to possess but one idea, and that was that his wife, his children, the world, all were trying to rob him, and that his one escape lay in flight with his treasure if only he could once gain possession of it. But how? How? One thing was sure. They should not have it. He would fight first; he would die. And alone in his silent field, with ragged body and mind, he brooded over riches and felt as if he already had them to defend.

In the meanwhile the first prospector had been meditating as to the ease, under the circumstances, with which Queeder’s land could be taken from him at the very nominal price of two thousand, considering the secrecy which, according to Queeder’s own wish, must attach to the transfer of all moneys over that sum. Once the deed was signed—the same reading for two thousand—in the presence of the wife and a lawyer who should accompany him, how easy to walk off and pay no more, standing calmly on the letter of the contract!

It was nearing that last day now and the terrible suspense was telling. Queeder was in no mental state to endure anything. His hollow eyes showed the wondering out of which nothing had come. His nervous strolling here and there had lost all semblance of reason. Then on the last of the sixty allotted days there rode forward the now bane of his existence, the original prospector, accompanied by Attorney Giles, of Arno, a veritable scamp and rascal of a lawyer.

At first on seeing them Queeder felt a strong impulse to run away, but on second consideration he feared so to do. The land was his. If he did not stay Dode and Mrs. Queeder might enter on some arrangement without his consent—something which would leave him landless, money-less—or they might find out something about the extra money he had taken and contracted for, the better price he was now privately to receive. It was essential that he stay, and yet he had no least idea as to how he would solve it all.

Jane, who was in the doorway as they entered the yard, was the one to welcome them, although Dode, watchful and working in a nearby patch, saluted them next. Then Mrs. Queeder examined them cynically and with much opposition. These, then, were the twain who were expecting to misuse her financially!

“Where’s your father, Dode?” asked Attorney Giles familiarly, for he knew them well.

“Over thar in the second ’tater patch,” answered Dode sourly. A moment later he added with rough calculation, “Ef ye’re comin’ about the land, though, I ’low ez ’twon’t do yuh no good. Maw an’ Paw have decided not tuh sell. The place is wuth a heap more’n whut you all’re offerin’. They’re sellin’ land roun’ Arno with not near ez much min’l onto hit ez this hez for three hundred now, an’ yuh all only wanta give two thousan’ fer the hull place, I hyur. Maw’n Paw’d be fools ef they’d agree tuh that.”

“Oh, come now,” exclaimed Giles placatively and yet irritably—a very wasp who was always attempting to smooth over the ruffled tempers of people on just such trying occasions as this. “Mr. Crawford here has an option on this property signed by your mother and father and witnessed by a Mr.”—he considered the slip—“a Mr. Botts—oh, yes, Lester Botts. You cannot legally escape that. All Mr. Crawford has to do is to offer you the money—leave it here, in fact—and the property is his. That is the law. An option is an option, and this one has a witness. I don’t see how you can hope to escape it, really.”

“They wuzn’t nuthin’ said about no min’l when I signed that air,” insisted Mrs. Queeder, “an’ I don’t ’low ez no paper whut I didn’t know the meanin’ uv is goin’ tuh be good anywhar. Leastways, I won’t put my name onto nuthin’ else.”

“Well, well!” said Mr. Giles fussily, “We’d better get Mr. Queeder in here and see what he says to this. I’m sure he’ll not take any such unreasonable and illegal view.”

In the meantime old Queeder, called for lustily by Jane, came edging around the house corner like some hunted animal—dark, fearful, suspicious—and at sight of him the prospector and lawyer, who had seated themselves, arose.

“Well, here we are, Mr. Queeder,” said the prospector, but stopped, astonished at the weird manner in which Queeder passed an aimless hand over his brow and gazed almost dully before him. He had more the appearance of a hungry bird than a human being. He was yellow, emaciated, all but wild.

“Look at Paw!” whispered Jane to Dode, used as she was to all the old man’s idiosyncrasies.

“Yes, Mr. Queeder,” began the lawyer, undisturbed by the whisper of Jane and anxious to smooth over a very troublesome situation, “here we are. We have come to settle this sale with you according to the terms of the option. I suppose you’re ready?”

“Whut?” asked old Queeder aimlessly, then, recovering himself slightly, began, “I hain’t goin’ tuh sign nuthin’! Nuthin’ ’tall! That’s whut I hain’t! Nuthin’!” He opened and closed his fingers and twisted and craned his neck as though physically there were something very much awry with him.

“What’s that?” queried the lawyer incisively, attempting by his tone to overawe him or bring him to his senses, “not sign? What do you mean by saying you won’t sign? You gave an option here for the sum of $100 cash in hand, signed by you and your wife and witnessed by Lester Botts, and now you say you won’t sign! I don’t want to be harsh, but there’s a definite contract entered into here and money passed, and such things can’t be handled in any such light way, Mr. Queeder. This is a contract, a very serious matter before the law, Mr. Queeder, a very serious matter. The law provides a very definite remedy in a case of this kind. Whether you want to sign or not, with this option we have here and what it calls for we can pay over the money before witnesses and enter suit for possession and win it.”

“Not when a feller’s never knowed whut he wuz doin’ when he signed,” insisted Dode, who by now, because of his self-interest and the appearance of his father having been misled, was coming round to a more sympathetic or at least friendly attitude.

“I’ll not sign nuthin’,” insisted Queeder grimly. “I hain’t a-goin’ tuh be swindled out o’ my prupetty. I never knowed they wuz min’l onto hit, like they is—leastways not whut it wuz wuth—an’ I won’t sign, an’ yuh ain’t a-goin’ tuh make me. Ye’re a-tryin’ tuh get it away from me fur nuthin’, that’s whut ye’re a-tryin’ tuh do. I won’t sign nuthin’!”

“I had no idee they wuz min’l onto hit when I signed,” whimpered Mrs. Queeder.

“Oh, come, come!” put in Crawford sternly, deciding to deal with this eccentric character and believing that he could overawe him by referring to the secret agreement between them, “don’t forget, Mr. Queeder, that I had a special agreement with you concerning all this.” He was not quite sure now as to what he would have to pay—the two or the eight. “Are you going to keep your bargain with me or not? You want to decide quick now. Which is it?”

“Git out!” shouted Queeder, becoming wildly excited and waving his hands and jumping backward. “Yuh swindled me, that’s whutcha done! Yut thort yuh’d git this place fer nothin’. Well, yuh won’t—yuh kain’t. I won’t sign nuthin’. I won’t sign nuthin’.” His eyes were red and wild from too much brooding.

Now it was that Crawford, who had been hoping to get it all for two thousand, decided to stick to his private agreement to pay eight, only instead of waiting to adjust it with Queeder in private he decided now to use it openly in an attempt to suborn the family to his point of view by showing them how much he really was to have and how unjust Queeder had planned to be to himself and them. In all certainty the family understood it as only two. If he would now let them know how matters stood, perhaps that would make a difference in his favor.

“You call eight thousand for this place swindling, and after you’ve taken eight hundred dollars of my money and kept it for sixty days?”

“Whut’s that?” asked Dode, edging nearer, then turning and glaring at his father and eyeing his mother amazedly. This surpassed in amount and importance anything he had imagined had been secured by them, and of course he assumed that both were lying. “Eight thousan’! I thort yuh said it wuz two!” He looked at his mother for confirmation.

The latter was a picture of genuine surprise. “That’s the fust I hearn uv any eight thousan’,” she replied dumbly, her own veracity in regard to the transaction being in question.

The picture that Queeder made under the circumstances was remarkable. Quite upset by this half-unexpected and yet feared revelation, he was now quite beside himself with rage, fear, the insolvability of the amazing tangle into which he had worked himself. The idea that after he had made an agreement with this man, which was really unfair to himself, he should turn on him in this way was all but mentally upsetting. Besides, the fact that his wife and son now knew how greedy and selfish he had been weakened him to the point of terror.

“Well, that’s what I offered him, just the same,” went on Crawford aggressively and noting the extreme effect, “and that’s what he agreed to take, and that’s what I’m here to pay. I paid him $800 in cash to bind the bargain, and he has the money now somewhere. His saying now that I tried to swindle him is too funny! He asked me not to say anything about it because the land was all his and he wanted to adjust things with you three in his own way.”

“Git outen hyur!” shouted Queeder savagely, going all but mad, “before I kill yuh! I hain’t signed nuthin’! We never said nuthin’ about no $8,000. It wuz $2,000—that’s what it wuz! Ye’re trin’ tuh swindle me, the hull varmint passel o’ yuh! I won’t sign nuthin’!” and he stooped and attempted to seize a stool that stood near the wall.

At this all retreated except Dode, who, having mastered his father in more than one preceding contest, now descended on him and with one push of his arm knocked him down, so weak was he, while the lawyer and prospector, seeing him prone, attempted to interfere in his behalf. What Dode was really thinking was that now was his chance. His father had lied to him. He was naturally afraid of him. Why not force him by sheer brute strength to accept this agreement and take the money? Once it was paid here before him, if he could make his father sign, he could take his share without let or hindrance. Of what dreams might not this be the fulfilment? “He agreed on’t, an’ now he’s gotta do it,” he thought; “that’s all.”

“No fighting, now,” called Giles. “We don’t want any fighting—just to settle this thing pleasantly, that’s all.”

After all, Queeder’s second signature or mark would be required, peaceably if possible, and besides they wished no physical violence. They were men of business, not of war.

“Yuh say he agreed tuh take $8,000, did he?” queried Dode, the actuality of so huge a sum ready to be paid in cash seeming to him almost unbelievable.

“Yes, that’s right,” replied the prospector.

“Then, by heck, he’s gotta make good on whut he said!” said Dode with a roll of his round head, his arms akimbo, heavily anxious to see the money paid over. “Here you,” he now turned to his father and began—for his prostrate father, having fallen and injured his head, was still lying semi-propped on his elbows, surveying the group with almost non-comprehending eyes, too confused and lunatic to quite realize what was going on or to offer any real resistance. “Whut’s a-gittin’ into yuh, anyhow, Ol’ Spindle Shanks? Git up hyur!” Dode went over and lifted his father to his feet and pushed him toward a chair at the table. “Yuh might ez well sign fer this, now ’at yuh’ve begun it. Whar’s the paper?” he asked of the lawyer. “Yuh just show him whar he orter sign, an’ I guess he’ll do it. But let’s see this hyur money that ye’re a-goin’ tuh pay over fust,” he added, “afore he signs. I wanta see ef it’s orl right.”

The prospector extracted the actual cash from a wallet, having previously calculated that a check would never be accepted, and the lawyer presented the deed to be signed. At the same time Dode took the money and began to count it.

“All he has to do,” observed Giles to the others as he did so, “is to sign this second paper, he and his wife. If you can read,” he said to Dode when the latter had concluded, and seeing how satisfactorily things were going, “you can see for yourself what it is.” Dode now turned and picked it up and looked at it as though it were as simple and clear as daylight. “As you can see,” went on the lawyer, “we agreed to buy this land of him for eight thousand dollars. We have already paid him eight hundred. That leaves seven thousand two hundred still to pay, which you have there,” and he touched the money in Dode’s hands. The latter was so moved by the reality of the cash that he could scarcely speak for joy. Think of it—seven thousand two hundred dollars—and all for this wretched bony land!

“Well, did yuh ever!” exclaimed Mrs. Queeder and Jane in chorus. “Who’d ’a’ thort! Eight thousan’!”

Old Queeder, still stunned and befogged mentally, was yet recovering himself sufficiently to rise from the chair and look strangely about, now that Dode was attempting to make him sign, but his loving son uncompromisingly pushed him back again.

“Never mind, Ol’ Spindle Shanks,” he repeated roughly. “Just yuh stay whar yuh air an’ sign as he asts yuh tuh. Yuh agreed tuh this, an’ yuh might ez well stick tuh it. Ye’re gittin’ so yuh don’t know what yuh want no more,” he jested, now that he realized that for some strange reason he had his father completely under his sway. The latter was quite helplessly dumb. “Yuh agreed tuh this, he says. Did ja? Air yuh clean gone?”

“Lawsy!” put in the excited Mrs. Queeder. “Eight thousan’! An’ him a-walkin’ roun’ hyur all the time sayin’ hit wuz only two an’ never sayin’ nuthin’ else tuh nobody! Who’d ’a’ thort hit! An’ him a-goin’ tuh git hit all ef he could an’ say nuthin’!”

“Yes,” added Jane, gazing at her father greedily and vindictively, “tryin’ tuh git it all fer hisself! An’ us a-workin’ hyur year in an’ year out on this hyur ol’ place tuh keep him comfortable!” She was no less hard in her glances than her brother. Her father seemed little less than a thief, attempting to rob them of the hard-earned fruit of their toil.

As the lawyer took the paper from Dode and spread it upon the old board table and handed Queeder a pen the latter took it aimlessly, quite as a child might have, and made his mark where indicated, Mr. Giles observing very cautiously, “This is of your own free will and deed, is it, Mr. Queeder?” The old man made no reply. For the time being anyhow, possibly due to the blow on his head as he fell, he had lost the main current of his idea, which was not to sign. After signing he looked vaguely around, as though uncertain as to what else might be requested of him, while Mrs. Queeder made her mark, answering “yes” to the same shrewd question. Then Dode, as the senior intelligence of this institution and the one who by right of force now dominated, having witnessed the marks of his father and mother, as did Jane, two signatures being necessary, he took the money and before the straining eyes of his relatives proceeded to recount it. Meanwhile old Queeder, still asleep to the significance of the money, sat quite still, but clawed at it as though it were something which he ought to want, but was not quite sure of it.

“You find it all right, I suppose?” asked the lawyer, who was turning to go. Dode acknowledged that it was quite correct.

Then the two visitors, possessed of the desired deed, departed. The family, barring the father, who sat there still in a daze, began to discuss how the remarkable sum was to be divided.

“Now, I just wanta tell yuh one thing, Dode,” urged the mother, all avarice and anxiety for herself, “a third o’ that, whutever ’tis, b’longs tuh me, accordin’ tuh law!”

“An’ I sartinly oughta git a part o’ that thar, workin’ the way I have,” insisted Jane, standing closely over Dode.

“Well, just keep yer hands off till I git through, cantcha?” asked Dode, beginning for the third time to count it. The mere feel of it was so entrancing! What doors would it not open? He could get married now, go to the city, do a hundred things he had always wanted to do. The fact that his father was entitled to anything or that, having lost his wits, he was now completely helpless, a pathetic figure and very likely from now on doomed to wander about alone or to do his will, moved him not in the least. By right of strength and malehood he was now practically master here, or so he felt himself to be. As he fingered the money he glowed and talked, thinking wondrous things, then suddenly remembering the concealed eight hundred, or his father’s part of it, he added, “Yes, an’ whar’s that other eight hundred, I’d like tuh know? He’s a-carryin’ it aroun’ with him er hidin’ it hyurabout mebbe!” Then eyeing the crumpled victim suspiciously, he began to feel in the old man’s clothes, but, not finding anything, desisted, saying they might get it later. The money in his hands was finally divided: a third to Mrs. Queeder, a fourth to Jane, the balance to himself as the faithful heir and helper of his father, the while he speculated as to the whereabouts of the remaining eight hundred.

Just then Queeder, who up to this time had been completely bereft of his senses, now recovered sufficiently to guess nearly all of what had so recently transpired. With a bound he was on his feet, and, looking wildly about him, exclaiming as he did so in a thin, reedy voice, “They’ve stole my prupetty! They’ve stole my prupetty! I’ve been robbed, I have! I’ve been robbed! Eh! Eh! Eh! This hyur land ain’t wuth only eight thousan’—hit’s wuth twenty-five thousan’, an’ that’s whut I could ’a’ had for it, an’ they’ve gone an’ made me sign it all away! Eh! Eh! Eh!” He jigged and moaned, dancing helplessly about until, seeing Dode with his share of the money still held safely in his hand, his maniacal chagrin took a new form, and, seizing it and running to the open door, he began to throw a portion of the precious bills to the winds, crying as he did so, “They’ve stole my prupetty! They’ve stole my prupetty! I don’t want the consarned money—I don’t want it! I want my prupetty! Eh! Eh! Eh!”

In this astonishing situation Dode saw but one factor—the money. Knowing nothing of the second prospector’s offer, he could not realize what it was that so infuriated the old man and had finally completely upset his mind. As the latter jigged and screamed and threw the money about he fell upon him with the energy of a wildcat and, having toppled him over and wrested the remainder of the cash from him, he held him safely down, the while he called to his sister and mother, “Pick up the money, cantcha? Pick up the money an’ git a rope, cantcha? Git a rope! Cantcha see he’s done gone plum daffy? He’s outen his head, I tell yuh. He’s crazy, he is, shore! Git a rope!” and eyeing the money now being assembled by his helpful relatives, he pressed the struggling maniac’s body to the floor. When the latter was safely tied and the money returned, the affectionate son arose and, having once more recounted his share in order to see that it was all there, he was content to look about him somewhat more kindly on an all too treacherous world. Then, seeing the old man where he was trussed like a fowl for market, he added, somewhat sympathetically, it may be:

“Well, who’d ’a’ thort! Pore ol’ Pap! I do b’lieve he’s outen his mind for shore this time! He’s clean gone—plum daffy.”

“Yes, that’s whut he is, I do b’lieve,” added Mrs. Queeder with a modicum of wifely interest, yet more concerned at that with her part of the money than anything else.

Then Dode, his mother and sister began most unconcernedly to speculate as to what if anything was next to be done with the old farmer, the while the latter rolled a vacant eye over a scene he was no longer able to interpret.

X
MARRIAGE—FOR ONE

Whenever I think of love and marriage I think of Wray. That clerkly figure. That clerkly mind. He was among the first people I met when I came to New York and, like so many of the millions seeking to make their way, he was busy about his affairs. Fortunately, as I saw it, with the limitations of the average man he had the ambitions of the average man. At that time he was connected with one of those large commercial agencies which inquire into the standing of business men, small and large, and report their findings, for a price, to other business men. He was very much interested in his work and seemed satisfied that should he persist in it he was certain to achieve what was perhaps a fair enough ambition: a managership in some branch of this great concern, which same would pay him so much as five or six thousand a year. The thing about him that interested me, apart from a genial and pleasing disposition, was the fact that with all his wealth of opportunity before him for studying the human mind, its resources and resourcefulness, its inhibitions and liberations, its humor, tragedy, and general shiftiness and changefulness, still he was largely concerned with the bare facts of the differing enterprises whose character he was supposed to investigate. Were they solvent? Could and did they pay their bills? What was their capital stock? How much cash did they have on hand?... Such was the nature of the data he needed, and to this he largely confined himself.

Nevertheless, by turns he was amused or astonished or made angry or self-righteous by the tricks, the secretiveness, the errors and the downright meanness of spirit of so many he had to deal with. As for himself, he had the feeling that he was honest, straightforward, not as limited or worthless as some of these others, and it was on this score that he was convinced he would succeed, as he did eventually, within his limitations, of course. What interested me and now makes me look upon him always as an excellent illustration of the futility of the dream of exact or even suitable rewards was his clerkly and highly respectable faith in the same. If a man did as he should do, if he were industrious and honest and saving and courteous and a few more of those many things we all know we ought to be, then in that orderly nature of things which he assumed to hold one must get along better than some others. What—an honest, industrious, careful man not do better than one who was none of these things—a person who flagrantly disregarded them, say? What nonsense. It must be so. Of course there were accidents and sickness, and men stole from one another, as he saw illustrated in his daily round. And banks failed, and there were trusts and combinations being formed that did not seem to be entirely in tune with the interests of the average man. But even so, all things considered, the average man, if he did as above, was likely to fare much better than the one who did not. In short, there was such a thing as approximate justice. Good did prevail, in the main, and the wicked were punished, as they should be.

And in the matter of love and marriage he held definite views also. Not that he was unduly narrow or was inclined to censure those whose lives had not worked out as well as he hoped his own would, but he thought there was a fine line of tact somewhere in this matter of marriage which led to success there quite as the qualities outlined above led, or should lead, to success in matters more material or practical. One had to understand something about women. One had to be sure that when one went a-courting one selected a woman of sense as well as of charm, one who came of good stock and hence would be possessed of good taste and good principles. She need not be rich; she might even be poor. And one had to be reasonably sure that one loved her. So many that went a-courting imagined they loved and were loved when it was nothing more than a silly passing passion. Wray knew. And so many women were designing, or at least light and flighty; they could not help a serious man to succeed if they would. However, in many out-of-the-way corners of the world were the really sensible and worthy girls, whom it was an honor to marry, and it was one of these that he was going to choose. Yet even there it was necessary to exercise care: one might marry a girl who was too narrow and conventional, one who would not understand the world and hence be full of prejudices. He was for the intelligent and practical and liberal girl, if he could find her, one who was his mental equal.

It was when he had become secretary to a certain somebody that he encountered in his office a girl who seemed to him to embody nearly all of the virtues or qualities which he thought necessary. She was the daughter of very modestly circumstanced parents who dwelt in the nearby suburb of O——, and a very capable and faithful stenographer, of course. If you had seen the small and respectable suburb from which she emanated you would understand. She was really pretty and appeared to be practical and sensible in many ways, but still very much in leash to the instructions and orders and tenets of her home and her church and her family circle, three worlds as fixed and definite and worthy and respectable in her thought as even the most enthusiastic of those who seek to maintain the order and virtue of the world would have wished. According to him, as he soon informed me—since we exchanged nearly all our affairs whenever we met, she was opposed to the theatre, dancing, any form of night dining or visiting in the city on weekdays, as well as anything that in her religious and home world might be construed as desecration of the Sabbath. I recall him describing her as narrow “as yet,” but he hoped to make her more liberal in the course of time. He also told me with some amusement and the air of a man of the world that it was impossible for him to win her to so simple an outing as rowing on the Sabbath on the little river near her home because it was wrong; on the contrary, he had to go to church with her and her parents. Although he belonged to no church and was mildly interested in socialism, he kept these facts from her knowledge. The theatre could not even be mentioned as a form of amusement and she could not and would not dance; she looked upon his inclination for the same as not only worldly but loose and sinful. However, as he told me, he was very fond of her and was doing his best to influence and enlighten her. She was too fine and intelligent a girl to stick to such notions. She would come out of them.

By very slow degrees (he was about his business of courting her all of two or three years) he succeeded in bringing her to the place where she did not object to staying downtown to dinner with him on a weekday, even went with him to a sacred or musical concert of a Sunday night, but all unbeknown to her parents or neighbors, of course. But what he considered his greatest triumph was when he succeeded in interesting her in books, especially bits of history and philosophy that he thought very liberal and which no doubt generated some thin wisps of doubt in her own mind. Also, because he was intensely fond of the theatre and had always looked upon it as the chiefest of the sources of his harmless entertainment, he eventually induced her to attend one performance, and then another and another. In short, he emancipated her in so far as he could, and seemed to be delighted with the result.

With their marriage came a new form of life for both of them, but more especially for her. They took a small apartment in New York, a city upon which originally she had looked with no little suspicion, and they began to pick up various friends. It was not long before she had joined a literary club which was being formed in their vicinity, and here she met a certain type of restless, pushing, seeking woman for whom Wray did not care—a Mrs. Drake and a Mrs. Munshaw, among others, who, from the first, as he afterward told me, he knew could be of no possible value to any one. But Bessie liked them and was about with them here, there, and everywhere.

It was about this time that I had my first suspicion of anything untoward in their hitherto happy relations. I did not see him often now, but when I did visit them at their small apartment, could not help seeing that Mrs. Wray was proving almost too apt a pupil in the realm in which he had interested her. It was plain that she had been emancipated from quite all of her old notions as to the sinfulness of the stage, and in regard to reading and living in general. Plainly, Wray had proved the Prince Charming, who had entered the secret garden and waked the sleeping princess to a world of things she had never dreamed of. She had reached the place where she was criticizing certain popular authors, spoke of a curiously enlightened history of France she was reading, of certain bits of philosophy and poetry which her new club were discussing. From the nature of the conversation being carried on by the three of us I could see that Wray was beginning to feel that the unsophisticated young girl he had married a little while before might yet outstrip him in the very realm in which he had hoped to be her permanent guide. More than once, as I noticed, she chose to question or contradict him as to a matter of fact, and I think he was astonished if not irritated by the fact that she knew more than he about the import of a certain plot or the relativity of certain dates in history. And with the force and determination that had caused her to stand by her former convictions, she now aired and defended her new knowledge. Not that her manner was superior or irritating exactly; she had a friendly way of including and consulting him in regard to many things which indicated that as yet she had no thought of manifesting a superiority which she did not feel. “That’s not right, dearest. His name is Bentley. He is the author of a play that was here last year—The Seven Rings of Manfred—don’t you remember?” And Wray, much against his will, was compelled to confess that she was right.

Whenever he met me alone after this, however, he would confide the growing nature of his doubts and perplexities. Bessie was no more the girl she had been when he first met her than he was like the boy he had been at ten years of age. A great, a very great change was coming over her. She was becoming more aggressive and argumentative and self-centred all the time, more this, more that. She was reading a great deal, much too much for the kind of life she was called upon to lead. Of late they had been having long and unnecessary arguments that were of no consequence however they were settled, and yet if they were not settled to suite her she was angry or irritable. She was neglecting her home and running about all the time with her new-found friends. She did not like the same plays he did. He wanted a play that was light and amusing, whereas she wanted one with some serious moral or intellectual twist to it. She read only serious books now and was attending a course of lectures, whereas he, as he now confessed, was more or less bored by serious books. What was the good of them? They only stirred up thoughts and emotions which were better left unstirred. And she liked music, or was pretending she did, grand opera, recitals and that sort of thing, whereas he was not much interested in music. Grand opera bored him, and he was free to admit it, but if he would not accompany her she would go with one or both of those two wretched women he was beginning to detest. Their husbands had a little money and gave them a free rein in the matter of their social and artistic aspirations. They had no household duties to speak of and could come and go as they chose, and Wray now insisted that it was they who were aiding and abetting Bessie in these various interests and enthusiasms and stirring her up to go and do and be. What was he to do? No good could come if things went on as they were going. They were having frequent quarrels, and more than once lately she had threatened to leave him and do for herself here in New York, as he well knew she could. He was doing very well now and they could be happy together if only these others could be done away with.

It was only a month or two after this that Wray came to see me, in a very distrait state of mind. After attempting to discuss several other things quite casually he confessed that his young wife had left him. She had taken a room somewhere and had resumed work as a stenographer, and although he met her occasionally in the subway she would have nothing to do with him. She wanted to end it all. And would I believe it? She was accusing him of being narrow and ignorant and stubborn and a number of other things! Only think of it! And three or four years ago she had thought he was all wrong when he wanted to go rowing on Sunday or stay downtown to dinner of an evening. Could such things be possible? And yet he loved her, in spite of all the things that had come up between them. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help thinking how sweet and innocent and strange she was when he first met her, how she loved her parents and respected their wishes. And now see. “I wish to God,” he suddenly exclaimed in the midst of the “oldtime” picture he was painting of her, “that I hadn’t been so anxious to change her. She was all right as she was, if I had only known it. She didn’t know anything about these new-fangled things then, and I wasn’t satisfied till I got her interested in them. And now see. She leaves me and says I’m narrow and stubborn, that I’m trying to hold her back intellectually. And all because I don’t want to do all the things she wants to do and am not interested in the things that interest her, now.”

I shook my head. Of what value was advice in such a situation as this, especially from one who was satisfied that the mysteries of temperament of either were not to be unraveled or adjusted save by nature—the accidents of chance and affinity, or the deadly opposition which keep apart those unsuited to each other? Nevertheless, being appealed to for advice, I ventured a silly suggestion, borrowed from another. He had said that if he could but win her back he would be willing to modify the pointless opposition and contention that had driven her away. She might go her intellectual way as she chose if she would only come back. Seeing him so tractable and so very wishful, I now suggested a thing that had been done by another in a somewhat related situation. He was to win her back by offering her such terms as she would accept, and then, in order to bind her to him, he was to induce her to have a child. That would capture her sympathy, very likely, as well as insinuate an image of himself into her affectionate consideration. Those who had children rarely separated—or so I said.

The thought appealed to him intensely. It satisfied his practical and clerkly nature. He left me hopefully and I saw nothing of him for several months, at the end of which time he came to report that all was once more well with him. She had come back, and in order to seal the new pact he had taken a larger apartment in a more engaging part of the city. Bessie was going on with her club work, and he was not opposing her in anything. And then within the year came a child and there followed all those simple, homey, and seemingly binding and restraining things which go with the rearing and protection of a young life.

But even during that period, as I was now to learn, all was not as smooth as I had hoped. Talking to me in Wray’s absence once Bessie remarked that, delightful as it was to have a child of her own, she could see herself as little other than a milch cow with an attendant calf, bound to its service until it should be able to look after itself. Another time she remarked that mothers were bond-servants, that even though she adored her little girl she could not help seeing what a chain and a weight a child was to one who had ambitions beyond those of motherhood. But Wray, clerkly soul that he was, was all but lost in rapture. There was a small park nearby, and here he could be found trundling his infant in a handsome baby-carriage whenever his duties would permit. He would sit or walk where were others who had children of about the age of his own so that he might compare them. He liked to speculate on the charm and innocence of babyhood and was amused by a hundred things which he had never noticed in the children of others. Already he was beginning to formulate plans for little Janet’s future. It was hard for children to be cooped up in an apartment house in the city. In a year or two, if he could win Bessie to the idea, they would move to some suburban town where Janet could have the country air.

They were prospering now and could engage a nursemaid, so Mrs. Wray resumed her intellectual pursuits and her freedom. Throughout it all one could see that, respect Wray as she might as a dutiful and affectionate and methodical man, she could not love or admire him, and that mainly because of the gap that lay between them intellectually. Dissemble as he might, there was always the hiatus that lies between those who think or dream a little and those who aspire and dream much. Superiority of intellect was not altogether the point; she was not so much superior as different, as I saw it. Rather, they were two differing rates of motion, flowing side by side for the time being only, his the slower, hers the quicker. And it mattered not that his conformed more to the conventional thought and emotions of the majority. Hers was the more satisfactory to herself and constituted an urge which he feared rather than despised; and his was more satisfactory to himself, compromise as he would. Observing them together one could see how proud he was of her and of his relationship to her, how he felt that he had captured a prize, regardless of the conditions by which it was retained; and on the other hand one could easily see how little she held him in her thought and mood. She was forever talking to others about those things which she knew did not interest him or to which he was opposed.

For surcease she plunged into those old activities that had so troubled him at first, and now he complained that little Janet was being neglected. She did not love her as she should or she could not do as she was doing. And what was more and worse, she had now taken to reading Freud and Kraft-Ebbing and allied thinkers and authorities, men and works that he considered dreadful and shameful, even though he scarcely grasped their true significance.

One day he came to me and said: “Do you know of a writer by the name of Pierre Loti?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I know his works. What about him?”

“What do you think of him?”

“As a writer? Why, I respect him very much. Why?”

“Oh, I know, from an intellectual point of view, as a fine writer, maybe. But what do you think of his views of life—of his books as books to be read by the mother of a little girl?”

“Wray,” I replied, “I can’t enter upon a discussion of any man’s works upon purely moral grounds. He might be good for some mothers and evil for others. Those who are to be injured by a picture of life must be injured, or kept from its contaminating influence, and those who are to be benefited will be benefited. I can’t discuss either books or life in any other way. I see worthwhile books as truthful representations of life in some form, nothing more. And it would be unfair to any one who stood in intellectual need to be restrained from that which might prove of advantage to him. I speak only for myself, however.”

It was not long after that I learned there had been a new quarrel and that Bessie had left him once more, this time, as it proved, for good. And with her, which was perhaps illegal or unfair, she had taken the child. I did not know what had brought about this latest rupture but assumed that it was due to steadily diverging views. They could not agree on that better understanding of life which at one time he was so anxious for her to have—his understanding. Now that she had gone beyond that, and her method of going was unsatisfactory to him, they could not agree, of course.

Not hearing from him for a time I called and found him living in the same large apartment they had taken. Its equipment was better suited to four than to one, yet after seven or eight months of absence on her part here he was, living alone, where every single thing must remind him of her and Janet. As for himself, apart from a solemnity and reserve which sprang from a wounded and disgruntled spirit, he pretended an indifference and a satisfaction with his present state which did not square with his past love for her. She had gone, yes; but she had made a mistake and would find it out. Life wasn’t as she thought it was. She had gone with another man—he was sure of that, although he did not know who the man was. It was all due to one of those two women she had taken up with, that Mrs. Drake. They were always interested in things which did not and could not interest him. After a time he added that he had been to see her parents. I could not guess why, unless it was because he was lonely and still very much in love and thought they might help him to understand the very troublesome problem that was before him.

It was a year and a half before I saw him again, during which time, as I knew, he continued to live in the apartment they had occupied together. He had become manager of a department of the agency by this time and was going methodically to and fro between his home and office. After living alone and brooding for more than a year, he came to see me one rainy November night. He looked well enough materially, quite the careful person who takes care of his clothes, but thinner, more tense and restless. He seated himself before my fire and declared that he was doing very well and was thinking of taking a long vacation to visit some friends in the West. (He had once told me that he had heard that Bessie had gone to California.) Yes, he was still living in the old place. I might think it strange, but he had not thought it worth while to move. He would only have to find another place to live in; the furniture was hard to pack; he didn’t like hotels.

Then of a sudden, noting that I studied him and wondered, he grew restless and finally stood up, then walked about looking at some paintings and examining a shelf of books. His manner was that of one who is perplexed and undetermined, of one who has stood out against a silence and loneliness of which he was intensely weary. Then of a sudden he wheeled and faced me: “I can’t stand it. That’s what’s the matter. I just can’t stand it any longer. I’ve tried and tried. I thought the child would make things work out all right, but she didn’t. She didn’t want a child and never forgave me for persuading her to have Janet. And then that literary craze—that was really my own fault, though. I was the one that encouraged her to read and go to theatres. I used to tell her she wasn’t up-to-date, that she ought to wake up and find out what was going on in the world, that she ought to get in with intelligent people. But it wasn’t that either. If she had been the right sort of woman she couldn’t have done as she did.” He paused and clenched his hands nervously and dramatically. It was as though he were denouncing her to her face instead of to me.

“Now, Wray,” I interposed, “how useless to say that. Which of us is as he should be? Why will you talk so?”

“But let me tell you what she did,” he went on fiercely. “You haven’t an idea of what I’ve been through, not an idea. She tried to poison me once so as to get rid of me.” And here followed a brief and sad recital of the twists and turns and desperation of one who was intensely desirous of being free of one who was as desirous of holding her. And then he added: “And she was in love with another man, only I could never find out who he was.” And his voice fell to a low, soft level, as though he was even then trying to solve the mystery of who it was. “And I know she had an operation performed, though I could never prove it.” And he gave me details of certain mysterious goings to and fro, of secret pursuits on his part, actions and evidences and moods and quarrels that pointed all too plainly to a breach that could never be healed. “And what’s more,” he exclaimed at last, “she tortured me. You’ll never know. You couldn’t. But I loved her.... And I love her now.” Once more the tensely gripped fingers, the white face, the flash of haunted eyes.

“One afternoon I stood outside of a window of an apartment house when I knew she was inside, and I knew the name of the man who was supposed to occupy it, only he had re-sublet it, as I found out afterwards. And she had Janet with her—think of that!—our own little girl! I saw her come to the window once to look out—I actually saw her in another man’s rooms. I ran up and hammered at the door—I tried to break it open. I called to her to come out but she wouldn’t, and I went to get a policeman to make him open the door. But when I got back a servant was coming up as though she had been out, and she unlocked the door and went in. It was all a ruse, and I know it. They weren’t inside. She had slipped out with Janet. And she had told me they were going to Westchester for the day.

“And another time I followed her to a restaurant when she said she was going to visit a friend. I suspected there was a man—the man I thought she was going with, but it was some one I had never seen before. When they came out and were getting into a cab I came up and told them both what I thought of them. I threatened to kill them both. And she told him to go and then came home with me, but I couldn’t do anything with her. She wouldn’t talk to me. All she would say was that if I didn’t like the way she was doing I could let her go. She wanted me to give her a divorce. And I couldn’t let her go, even if I had wanted to. I loved her too much. And I love her too much now. I do. I can’t help it.” He paused. The pain and regret were moving.

“Another time,” he went on, “I followed her to a hotel—yes, to a hotel. But when I got inside she was waiting for me; she had seen me. I even saw a man coming toward her—but not the one I believed was the one—only when he saw me he turned away and I couldn’t be sure that he was there to meet her. And when I tried to talk to her about him she turned away from me and we went back home in silence. I couldn’t do anything with her. She would sit and read and ignore me for days—days, I tell you—without ever a word.”

“Yes,” I said, “but the folly of all that. The uselessness, the hopelessness. How could you?”

“I know, I know,” he exclaimed, “but I couldn’t help it. I can’t now. I love her. I can’t help that, can I? I’m miserable without her. I see the folly of it all, but I’m crazy about her. The more she disliked me the more I loved her. And I love her now, this minute. I can’t help it. There were days when she tortured me so that I vomited, from sheer nervousness. I was sick and run down. I have been cold with sweat in her presence and when she was away and I didn’t know where she was. I have walked the streets for hours, for whole days at a time, because I couldn’t eat or sleep and didn’t know what to do. By God!” Once more the pause and a clenching of the hands. “And all I could do was think and think and think. And that is all I do now really—think and think and think. I’ve never been myself since she went away. I can’t shake it off. I live up there, yes. But why? Because I think she might come back some day, and because we lived there together. I wait and wait. I know it’s foolish, but still I wait. Why? God only knows. And yet I wait. Oh,” he sighed, “and it’s three years now. Three years!”

He paused and gazed at me and I at him, shaken by a fact that was without solution by any one. Here he was—the one who had understood so much about women. But where was she, the one he had sought to enlighten, to make more up-to-date and liberal? I wondered where she was, whether she ever thought of him even, whether she was happy in her new freedom. And then, without more ado, he slipped on his raincoat, took up his umbrella, and stalked out into the rain, to walk and think, I presume. And I, closing the door on him, studied the walls, wondering. The despair, the passion, the rage, the hopelessness, the love. “Truly,” I thought, “this is love, for one at least. And this is marriage, for one at least. He is spiritually wedded to that woman, who despises him, and she may be spiritually wedded to another man who may despise her. But love and marriage, for one, at least, I have seen here in this room to-night, and with mine own eyes.”

XI
FULFILMENT

Hearing the maid tap lightly on her door for the third or fourth time, Ulrica uttered a semiconscious “Come.” It was her usual rising hour but to-day she was more depressed than usual, although the condition was common enough at all times. The heavy drag of a troubled mental state was upon her. Was it never to end? Was she never to be happy again? After several weeks of a decidedly acceptable loneliness, during which Harry had been in the west looking after his interminable interests, he was about to return. The weariness of that, to begin with! And while she could not say that she really hated or even disliked him deeply (he was too kind and considerate for that), still his existence, his able and different personality, constantly forced or persuaded upon her, had come to be a bore. The trouble was that she did not truly love him and never could. He might be, as he was, rich, resourceful and generous to a fault in her case, a man whom the world of commerce respected, but how did that avail her? He was not her kind of man. Vivian before him had proved that. And other men had been and would be as glad to do as much if not more.

Vivian had given all of himself in a different way. Only Harry’s seeking, begging eyes pleading with her (after Vivian’s death and when she was so depressed) had preyed upon and finally moved her to sympathy. Life had not mattered then, (only her mother and sister), and she had become too weary to pursue any career, even for them. So Harry with his wealth and anxiety to do for her—

(The maid entered softly, drew back the curtains and raised the blinds, letting in a flood of sunshine, then proceeded to arrange the bath.)

It had been, of course, because of the magic of her beauty—how well she knew the magic of that!—plus an understanding and sympathy she had for the miseries Harry had endured in his youth, that had caused him to pursue her with all the pathetic vehemence of a man of fifty. He was not at all like Vivian, who had been shy and retiring. Life had seemed to frighten poor Vivian and drive him in upon himself in an uncomplaining and dignified way. In Harry’s case it had acted contrariwise. Some men were so, especially the old and rich, those from whom life was slipping away and for whom youth, their lost youth, seemed to remain a colored and enthralling spectacle however wholly gone. The gifts he had lavished upon her, the cars, the jewels, this apartment, stocks and bonds, even that house in Seadale for her sister and mother! And all because of a beauty that meant so little to her now that Vivian was gone, and in the face of an indifference so marked that it might well have wearied any man.

How could she go on? (She paused in her thoughts to survey and follow her maid, who was calling for the second time.) Though he hung upon her least word or wish and was content to see her at her pleasure, to run her errands and be ever deferential and worshipful, still she could not like him, could barely tolerate him. Before her always now was Vivian with his brooding eyes and elusive, sensitive smile; Vivian, who had never a penny to bless himself with. She could see him now striding to and fro in his bare studio, a brush in one hand, or sitting in his crippled chair meditating before a picture or talking to her of ways and means which might be employed to better their state. The pathos!

“I cannot endure that perfume, Olga!”

In part she could understand her acceptance of Harry after Vivian (only it did not seem understandable always, even to her), for in her extreme youth her parents had been so very poor. Perhaps because of her longings and childish fears in those days she had been marked in some strange way that had eventually led her to the conviction that wealth was so essential. For her parents were certainly harassed from her sixth to her thirteenth years, when they recovered themselves in part. Some bank or concern had failed and they had been thrown on inadequate resources and made to shift along in strange ways. She could remember an old brick house with a funereal air and a weedy garden into which they had moved and where for a long time they were almost without food. Her mother had cried more than once as she sat by the open window looking desolately out, while Ulrica, not quite comprehending what it was all about, had stared at her from an adjacent corner.

“Will madame have the iris or the Japanese lilac in the water?”

She recalled going downtown once on an errand and slipping along shyly because her clothes were not good. And when she saw some schoolgirls approaching, hid behind a tree so they should not see her. Another time, passing the Pilkington at dinner-time, the windows being open and the diners visible, she had wondered what great persons they must be to be able to bask in so great a world. It was then perhaps that she had developed the obsession for wealth which had led to this. If only she could have seen herself as she now was she would not have longed so. (She paused, looking gloomily back into the past.) And then had come the recovery of her father in some way or other. He had managed to get an interest in a small stove factory and they were no longer so poor—but that was after her youth had been spoiled, her mind marked in this way.

And to crown it all, at seventeen had come Byram the inefficient. And because he was “cute” and had a suggestion of a lisp; was of good family and really insane over her, as nearly every youth was once she had turned fourteen, she had married him, against her parents’ wishes, running away with him and lying about her age, as did he about his. And then had come trying times. Byram was no money-maker, as she might have known. He was inexperienced, and being in disfavor with his parents for ignoring them in his hasty choice of a wife, he was left to his own devices. For two whole years what had she not endured—petty wants which she had concealed from her mother, furniture bought on time and dunned for, collectors with whom she had to plead not to take the stove or the lamp or the parlor table, and grocery stores and laundries and meat-markets which had to be avoided because of unpaid bills. There had even been an ejectment for non-payment of rent, and job after job lost for one reason and another, until the whole experiment had been discolored and made impossible even after comfort had been restored.

“I cannot endure the cries of the children, Olga. You will have to close that window.”

No; Byram was no money-maker, not even after his parents in far-distant St. Paul had begun to help him to do better. And anyhow by then, because she had had time to sense how weak he was, what a child, she was weary of him, although he was not entirely to blame. It was life. And besides, during all that time there had been the most urgent pursuit of her by other men, men of the world and of means, who had tried to influence her with the thought of how easily her life could be made more agreeable. Why remain faithful to so young and poor a man when so much could be done for her. But she had refused. Despite Byram’s lacks she had small interest in them, although their money and skill had succeeded in debasing Byram in her young and untrained imagination, making him seem even weaker and more ridiculous than he was. But that was all so long ago now and Vivian had proved so much more important in her life. While even now she was sorry for Harry and for Byram she could only think of Vivian, who was irretrievably gone. Byram was successful now and out of her life, but maybe if life had not been so unkind and they so foolish——

“You may have Henry serve breakfast and call the car!”

And then after Byram had come Newton, big, successful, important, a quondam employer of Byram, who had met her on the street one day when she was looking for work, just when she had begun to sense how inefficient Byram really was, and he had proved kind without becoming obnoxious or demanding. While declaring, and actually proving, that he wished nothing more of her than her good-will, he had aided her with work, an opportunity to make her own way. All men were not selfish. He had been the vice-president of the Dickerson Company and had made a place for her in his office, saying that what she did not know he would teach her since he needed a little sunshine there. And all the while her interest in Byram was waning, so much so that she had persuaded him to seek work elsewhere so that she might be rid of him, and then she had gone home to live with her mother. And Newton would have married her if she had cared, but so grieved was she by the outcome of her first love and marriage that she would not.

“The sedan, yes. And I will take my furs.”

And then, living with her mother and making her own way, she had been sought by others. But there had been taking root and growing in her an ideal which somehow in the course of time had completely mastered her and would not even let her think of anything else, save in moments of loneliness and the natural human yearning for life. This somehow concerned some one man, not any one she knew, not any one she was sure she would ever meet, but one so wonderful and ideal that for her there could be no other like him. He was not to be as young or unsophisticated as Byram, nor as old and practical as Newton, though possibly as able (though somehow this did not matter), but wise and delicate, a spirit-mate, some such wondrous thing as a great musician or artist might be, yet to whom in spite of his greatness she was to be all in all. She could not have told herself then how she was to have appealed to him, unless somehow surely, because of her great desire for him, her beauty and his understanding of her need. He was to have a fineness of mind and body, a breadth, a grasp, a tenderness of soul such as she had not seen except in pictures and dreams. And such as would need her.

“To Thorne and Company’s first, Fred.”

Somewhere she had seen pictures of Lord Byron, of Shelley, Liszt and Keats, and her soul had yearned over each, the beauty of their faces, the record of their dreams and seekings, their something above the common seeking and clayiness (she understood that now). They were of a world so far above hers. But before Vivian appeared, how long a journey! Life had never been in any hurry for her. She had gone on working and seeking and dreaming, the while other men had come and gone. There had been, for instance, Joyce with whom, had she been able to tolerate him, she might have found a life of comfort in so far as material things went. He was, however, too thin or limited spiritually to interest a stirring mind such as hers, a material man, and yet he had along with his financial capacity more humanity than most, a kind of spiritual tenderness and generosity at times towards some temperaments. But no art, no true romance. He was a plunger in real estate, a developer of tracts. And he lacked that stability and worth of temperament which even then she was beginning to sense as needful to her, whether art was present or not. He was handsomer than Byram, a gallant of sorts, active and ebullient, and always he seemed to sense, as might a homing pigeon, the direction in which lay his own best financial opportunities and to be able to wing in that direction. But beyond that, what? He was not brilliant mentally, merely a clever “mixer” and maker of money, and she was a little weary of men who could think only in terms of money. How thin some clever men really were!

“I rather like that. I’ll try it on.”

And so it had been with him as it had been with Byram and Newton, although he sought her eagerly enough! and so it was afterward with Edward and Young. They were all worthy men in their way. No doubt some women would be or already had been drawn to them and now thought them wonderful. Even if she could have married any one of them it would only have been to have endured a variation of what she had endured with Byram; with them it would have been of the mind instead of the purse, which would have been worse. For poor Byram, inefficient and inexperienced as he was, had had some little imagination and longings above the commonplace. But these, as contrasted with her new ideal——

“Yes, the lines of this side are not bad.”

Yes, in those days there had come to her this nameless unrest, this seeking for something better than anything she had yet known and which later, without rhyme or reason, had caused her to be so violently drawn to Vivian. Why had Vivian always grieved so over her earlier affairs? They were nothing, and she regretted them once she knew him.

“Yes, you may send me this one, and the little one with the jade pins.”

And then after Young had come Karel, the son of rich parents and well-placed socially in Braleigh. He was young, well-informed, a snob of sorts, although a gentle one. The only world he knew was that in which his parents had been reared. Their ways had been and always would be his, conservatism run mad. At thirty the only place to go in summer was Macomber Beach, and in winter the only place to be was in Braleigh. There he could meet his equals twenty times a day. They went to the same homes, the same hotels, the same parties the year round. It was all the life he wanted, and it was all the life she would have been expected to want. But by then she was being hopelessly held by this greater vision and something within had said: “No, no, no!”

“You were making over my ermine cape. Is it finished?”

And Loring! He, for a change, was a physician there in Braleigh and lived with his sister in Lankester Way, near her home, only hers was in a cheaper street. He was young and good-looking but seemed to think only of his practice, how it was to make him and achieve her perhaps, although it had all seemed so commonplace and practical to her. He was so keen as to his standing with the best people, always so careful of his ways and appearance, as though his life depended upon it. He might have married more to his social and financial advantage but he had wanted her. And she had never been able to endure him—never seriously tolerate his pursuit.

“Yes, if you would alter these sleeves I might like it.”

Whenever he saw her he would come hustling up. “My, but it’s nice to see you again, Ulrica. You are always the same, always charming, always beautiful—now don’t frown. Have you changed your mind yet, Ulrica? You don’t want to forget that I’m going to be one of the successful men here some day. Please do smile a little for me. I’ll be just as successful as Joyce or any of them.”

“And is it just success you think I want?” she had asked.

“Oh, I know it isn’t just that, but I’ve had a hard time and so have you. I know it wouldn’t do any good to offer you only success, but what I mean is that it makes everything so much easier. With you I could do anything—” and so he would ramble on.

“To McCafferey’s, the Post Street entrance.”

But the shrewd hard eyes and dapper figure and unvaried attention to his interests had all bored and after a time alienated her, since her ideal seemed to dwarf and discolor every one and everything. Was there not something somewhere much bigger than all this, these various and unending men, she had asked herself, some man not necessarily so successful financially but different? She had felt that she would find him somewhere, must indeed if her life was to mean anything to her. Always her great asset, her beauty, had been looked upon as the one thing she must keep for this other. And so it had gone, man after man and flirtation after flirtation. It had seemed as though it would never end. Even after she had transferred her life to the great city, to work, to go upon the stage if need be, there were more of these endless approaches and recessions; but, like the others, they had come and gone, leaving only a faint impression. Not until that day at Althea’s party in the rooming-house in which they both lived had she found the one who touched her.

And then—

“And now to the Willoughby.”

It was late afternoon and just as she was returning from her task of seeking work in connection with the stage that they met. There he was in Althea’s room, tall, spare, angular, slightly sallow and cloisterish, his heavy eyebrows low above his sunken eyes as though he sought to shut himself in to himself, and with those large dark eyes fixed ruminatively and yet somewhat uncertainly upon all, even her when she came. And from Althea she gathered that he was a painter of strange dark landscapes and decorations which many of those who knew seemed to think were wonderful but which as yet had achieved no recognition at all. Worse, he was from the Rockies, a sheep-rancher’s son, but had not been able to endure ranching. His future was still very far before him, and, as one could sense, he was so innocent of any desire to be put forward; he seemed half the time to be a—dream. By some strange freak of luck he was still there when she entered, sitting in a corner not entirely at ease, because, as he told her later, he was strange to such affairs and did not know when to go.

The brightness of the buildings in the spring sun!

And she had looked at his hands, at his commonplace clothes, and then, a little troubled by his gaze, had withdrawn hers. Again and again her eyes sought his or his hers, as though they were furtively surveying each other; as though each was unable to keep his eyes off the other. And by degrees there was set up in her a tremendous something that was like music and fear combined, as though all at once she had awakened and comprehended. She was no longer the complete master of herself, as she had always imagined, but was now seized upon and possessed by this stranger! In brief, here he was, her dream, and now she could do nothing save gaze nervously and appealingly—for what? Those dark, sombre eyes, the coarse black hair and sallow skin! Yes, it was he indeed, her love, her star, the one by whose mystic light she had been steering her course these many years. She sensed it. Knew it. He was here before her now as though saying: “Come.” And she could only smile foolishly without speaking. Her hands trembled and her throat tightened until she almost choked. “I never saw any one more beautiful than you,” he had said afterwards when they talked, and she had thrilled so that it was an effort not to cry out. And then he had sighed like a child and said: “Talk to me, about anything—but don’t go, will you?”

The air—the air—this day!

And so, realizing that he valued her for this one gift at least, her beauty, she had sought now to make him understand that she was his without, however, throwing herself beggingly before him. With her eyes, her smile, her every gesture, she had said: “I am yours! I am yours! Can’t you see?” At last, in his shy way, he had seemed to comprehend, but even then, as he afterwards confessed, he could not believe that anything so wonderful could follow so speedily upon contact, that one could love, adore, at sight. She had asked where he lived and if she might come and see his work, and with repressed intensity he had said: “I wish you would! I wish you could come to-day!” It had made her sad and yet laugh, too, for joy.

That single tree blooming in this long, hard block!

There and then, with only the necessary little interludes which propriety seemed to demand, and with longing and seeking on the part of each, had begun that wondrous thing, their love. Only it seemed to have had no fixed beginning,—to have been always—just been. For the day she had called him up his voice had so thrilled her that she could scarcely speak. She had still felt she had known him for so long. How could that have been?

“I was afraid you might not call,” he had said tremulously, and she had replied: “And I was wondering if you really wanted me to.”

And when she sought him out in his studio she had found it to be such a poor mean room over a stable, in a mean street among a maze of mean streets, and yet had thought it heaven. It was so like him, so bare and yet wonderful—a lovely spiritual mood set over against tawdry materials and surroundings.

“Drive me through the East Side, Fred.”

Better, she had found him painting or perhaps merely pretending to. He had on that old long gray linen duster which later became so familiar a thing to her. And to one side of him and his easel on a table were some of the colors of his palette, greens and purples and browns and blues. He had said so softly as he opened the door to her: “My painting is all bluffing to-day. I haven’t been able to think of anything but you, how you might not come, how you would look—” And then, without further introduction or explanation, under the north light of his roof window filtering down dustily upon them, he had put his arms about her and she her lips to his, and they had clung together, thinking only of each other, their joy and their love. And he had sighed, a tired sigh, or one of great relief after a strain, such a strain as she herself had been under.

That one little cloud in the sky!

And then after a time, he had shown her the picture he was painting, a green lush sea-marsh with a ribbon of dark enamel-like water laving the mucky strand, and overhead heavy, sombre, smoky clouds, those of a sultry summer day over a marsh. And in the distance, along the horizon, a fringe of trees showing as a filigree. But what a mood! Now it hung in the Wakefield Gallery—and— (Harry had helped to place it there for her!) But then he had said, putting his brushes aside: “But what is the use of trying to paint now that you are here?” And she had sighed for joy, so wonderful was it all.

The crowds in these East Side streets!

Yet what had impressed her most was that he made no apology for the bareness and cheapness of his surroundings. Outside were swarming push carts and crowds, the babble of the great foreign section, but it was all as though he did not hear. Over a rack at the back of the large bare room he had hung a strip of faded burnt orange silk and another of clear light green, which vivified what otherwise would have been dusty and gray. Behind this, as she later discovered, were his culinary and sleeping worlds.

And then, of course, had come other days.

But how like that first day was this one, so fresh and bright!

There was no question here of what was right or wrong, conventional or otherwise. This was love, and this her beloved. Had she not sought him in the highways and the byways? At the close of one afternoon, as she was insisting that she must continue her search for work, now more than ever since neither he nor she had anything, he had said sadly: “Don’t go. We need so little, Ulrica. Don’t. I can’t stand it now.” And she had come back. “No,” she had replied, “I won’t—I can’t—not any more, if you want me.”

And she had stayed.

And that wondrous, beautiful love-life! The only love-life she had ever known.

But just the same she had seen that she must redouble her efforts to make her way, and had. Six hundred dollars she had brought to the city was nearly all gone, and as for Vivian, his allotment was what he could earn, a beggar’s dole. During the days that followed, each bringing them closer, he had confessed more and more of the difficulties that confronted him, how hard it was to sell his wares. And she—it was needful for her to reopen the pages of her past. She had not been happy or prosperous, she told him; fortune might have been hers for the taking but she could not endure those who came with it. Now that she had the misery of her soul’s ache removed she must find something to do. The stage was her great opportunity. And plainly his life was one which had always been and must be based on the grudged dole that life offers to those who love its beauty and lift their eyes. So few, as yet, knew of his work or had been arrested by it. Yet if he persisted, as she felt,—if that wondrous something in his work which had attracted the sensitive and selective did not fail—

The hot, bare redness of the walls of these streets, so flowerless, so bleak, and yet so alive and human!

But all too well she understood that his life, unless changed by her, would ever be the meagre thing it had been. Beauty was his, but no more,—a beauty of mind and of dreams and of the streets and the night and the sea and the movements of life itself, but of that which was material he had nothing. That was for those whom she had been unable to endure. Only by a deft synthesis of those wondrous faculties which concern beauty was he able to perceive, respond to, translate the things which he saw and felt, and these were not of matter. Rather, they were epitomes, his pictures, of lands and skies and seas and strange valleys of dreams, worlds in miniature. But what transmutations and transferences! She was never weary of the pictures he made. Nor was she ever weary of the picture he made before his easel, tenuous and pale and concerned, his graceful hands at work with the colors he synthetized. The patience, the stability, the indifference to all but that which was his to do!

“Into Bartow Street, Fred.”

And in him, too, was no impatience with life for anything it might have failed to provide. Instead, he seemed ever to be thinking of its beauties and harmonies, the wonder of its dawns and sunsets, the colors and harmonies of its streets, buildings, crowds, silences. Often of a morning when it was yet dark he would arise and open a door that gave out onto a balcony and from there gaze upon the sky and city. And at any time it was always an instinct with him to pause before anything that appealed to either of them as beautiful or interesting. And in his eye was never the estimating glint of one who seeks to capture for profit that which is elemental and hence evanescent, but only the gaze of the lover of beauty, the worshiper of that which is profitable to the soul only.

The very street! The very studio!

Although she was ignorant of the spirit or the technique of art she had been able to comprehend it and him, all that he represented as a portion of beauty itself, the vast and supernal beauty toward which the creative forces of life in their harsh and yet tender ways seem impelled at times.

Had she not understood very well that it was as beauty that she appealed to him, at first anyhow, an artistry of face and form plus a certain mood of appreciation or adoration or understanding which was of value to him? How often had he spoken of her lavender-lidded eyes, the whiteness and roundness of her arms, the dark gold of her hair, the sombre unrevealing blue of the iris of her eyes! Here strange it was that these seemed to enthrall and hold him at times, leaving him, if not weak, at least childlike in her hands. He had never seemed to weary of her and during all their days together she could feel his unreasoning joy in her.

His one-time yellow curtains exchanged for green ones!

That she had proved and remained irresistible to him was evidenced by his welcoming and gratified eyes, the manner in which he paused to survey her whenever she came near, seeming to re-estimate her every least attribute with loving interest. Indeed, he seemed to need her as much as she needed him, to yearn with an intense hunger over her as a thing of beauty,—he who to her was strength, beauty, ideals, power, all the substance of beauty and delight that she could crave.

Yes, here was where they had come to gaze at the towers of the bridge beyond.

And so for over a year it was that they clung together, seeking to make of their lives an ideal thing. Only it was after she came into his life that he had begun to worry—and because of what? It was no hardship for him to live upon what he could make, but now that she had come, with her beauty and her beauty’s needs, it was no longer the same. As soon as she appeared he had seemed to sense his inefficiency as a creator of means. Bowdler, the wealthy dealer, had once told him that if he pleased him with something it might be worth five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars! But when he took a painting to Bowdler he said he was overstocked, had too many of his things on hand—the very things that to-day—(now that Vivian was gone) —were selling for as much as ten and twelve thousand! And a single one of all those now being sold would have made them both happy for a whole year or more!

He had called this tree her parasol!

And she had been able to do so little for him! Realizing how little life had done for him she had decided then and there that all her efforts must be bent toward correcting this injustice. Life owed him more. And so it was that at last she had turned to the stage and sought earnestly, day after day and week after week, only to obtain very little of all she needed to make them happy, a small part in one of Wexford’s many productions, he of the comedies and farces and beauty shows. Yet after some effort she had made him admit that she was distinctive and that he could use her. But then had come that long wait of nearly three months before the work began! And in the meantime what labor, the night and day work of rehearsals and appearances, the trying to get back to him each afternoon or night. And he had been so patient and hopeful and helpful, waiting for her after late hours of rehearsal to walk home with her and encouraging her in every way. And yet always there was a tang of something unreal about it all, hopes, as she so truly feared, that were never to be realized, dreams too good to come true. The hours had flown. The very pressure of his hand had suggested paradise, present and yet not to be.

She must be returning now. It was not wise for her to sit here alone.

And while those three months were dragging their slow days she had borrowed what money she could to keep them going. She had even borrowed from her mother! Yet they had been happy, wandering here and there, he always rejoicing in the success which her work promised to bring her. The studios facing the great park where she now lived at which they had looked, he seeming to think they were not for such as he. (The creatures who really dwelt there!)

Yes, she must be going. His train was due at four.

And then at last, her trial period was over, Wexford had complimented her and her salary had been increased. She had begun to buy things for Vivian and his studio, much as he protested. But best of all for her the hope of better days still to come, greater fame for herself and so better days for Vivian, a real future in which he was to share—money,—comfort for them both.

“To the apartment, Fred.”

And then—In spite of all her wishes and fears, had come the necessity for her to go on the road with the show. And owing to their limited means he was compelled to remain behind. Worse, despite the fact that each knew that every thought was for the other, the thought of separation tortured them both. Wherever she was there was the thought of him, alone, at his easel and brooding. And herself alone. It had seemed at times as though she must die unless this separation could be ended.

If only Harry were not coming into her life again!

But it was not ended—for weeks. And then one day, after a brief silence had come the word that he had been ill. A wave of influenza was sweeping the city and had seized him. She was not to worry. But she did worry—and returned immediately, only to find him far along the path which he was never to retrace. He was so ill. And worse, a strange despondency based on the thought that he was never to get well, had seized him. He had felt when she left, or so he said, that something were sure to happen. They might not ever, really, be together again. It had been so hard for him to do without her.

He had added that he was sorry to be so poor a fighter, to bring her back from her work. Her work! And he ill!

The immense wall these hotels made along the park!

And then against the utmost protest of her soul had come the end, a conclusion so sudden and unexpected that it had driven despair like metal into her very soul. Hour after hour and under her very eyes, her protesting if not restraining hands and thoughts, he had grown weaker. Though he knew, he seemed to wish to deny it, until at last his big dear eyes fixed upon her, he had gone, looking as though he wished to say something.

This wretchedly wealthy West Side!

It was that look, the seeking in it, that wishing to remain with her that was written there, that had haunted her and did still. It was as though he had wished to say: “I do not want to go! I do not want to go!”

And then, half-dead, she had flung herself upon him. With her hands she had tried to draw him back, until she was led away. For days she was too ill to know, and only his grave—chosen by strangers!—had brought it all back. And then the long days! Never again would life be the same. For the first time in her life she had been happy. A bowl of joy had been placed in her eager fingers, only to be dashed from them. Yes, once more now she was alone and would remain so, thrust back upon herself. And worse, with the agonizing knowledge of what beauty might be. Life had lost its lustre. What matter if others told of her beauty, if one or many sought to make her life less bare?

This stodgy porter always at the door in his showy braid! Why might not such as he die instead?

But then her mother and sister, learning of her despair, had come to her. Only since there was nothing that any pleasure, or aspect of life could offer her, the days rolled drearily,—meaninglessly. And only because of what was still missing in her mother’s life, material comfort, had she changed. It had been with the thought of helping her mother that after a year she had returned to the city and the stage, but exhausted, moping, a dreary wanderer amid old and broken dreams.

By degrees of course she had managed to pick up the threads of her life again. Who did not? And now nature, cynical, contemptuous of the dreams and longings which possess men, now lavished upon her that which she and Vivian had longed for in vain. Fame? It was hers. Money? A Score of fortunes had sought her in vain. Friendship? She could scarcely drive it from the door. She was successful.

But what mattered it now? Was it not a part of the routine, shabby method of life to first disappoint one—sweat and agonize one—and then lavish luxury upon one,—afterwards?

“I want nothing. And if any one calls, I am not in.”

And so it was that after a time Harry descending upon her with his millions, and seeking solace for himself through her sympathy, she had succumbed to that—or him—as a kindly thing to do. He too had confessed to a wretched dole of difficulties that had dogged his early years. He too had been disappointed in love, comfort—almost everything until too late. In his earliest years he had risen at four in a mill-town to milk cows and deliver milk, only later to betake himself, barefooted and in the snow, to a mill to work. Later still he had worked in a jewelry factory, until his lungs had failed. And had then taken to the open road as a peripatetic photographer of street children in order to recover his health. But because of this work—the chemistry, and physics of photography—he had interested himself in chemistry and physics—later taking a “regular job,” as he phrased it, in a photographic supply house and later still opening a store of his own. It was here that he had met Kesselbloom, who had solved the mystery of the revolving shutter and the selenium bath. Financing him and his patents, he had been able to rise still more, to fly really, as though others were standing still. The vast Dagmar Optical and Photographic Company. It was now his, with all its patents. And the Baker-Wile Chemical Company. Yes, now he was a multimillionaire, and lonely—as lonely as she was. Strange that he and she should have met.

“No, I will not see any one.”

So now, through her, he was seeking the youth which could be his no more. Because of some strange sense of comradeship in misery, perhaps, they had agreed to share each other’s unhappiness!

“You say Mr. Harris telephoned from the station?”

Yes, as he had told her in his brooding hours, at fifty it had suddenly struck him that his plethora of wealth was pointless. As a boy he had not learned to play, and now it was too late. Already he was old and lonely. Where lay his youth or any happiness?

And so now—nearly icy-cold the two of them, and contemning life dreams—they were still facing life together. And here he was this day, at her door or soon would be, fresh from financial labors in one city and another. And returning to what? With a kind of slavish and yet royal persistence he still pursued her—to comfort—as well as to be comforted, and out of sheer weariness she endured him. Perhaps because he was willing to await her mood, to accept the least crumb of her favor as priceless. The only kinship that existed between them was this unhappy youth of his and her sympathy for it, and his seeming understanding of and sympathy for the ills that had beset her. Supposing (so his argument had run) that the burden of this proposed friendship with him were to be made very light, the lightest of all burdens, that upon closer contact he proved not so hopeless or dull as he appeared, could she not—would she not—endure him? (The amazing contrarieties and strangenesses of things!) And so friendship, and later marriage under these strange conditions. Yet she could not love him, never had and never would. However it might have seemed at first—and she did sympathize with and appreciate him—still only because of her mother and sister and the fact that she herself needed some one to fall back upon, a support in this dull round of living, had caused her to go on as long as she had.

How deserted that wading-pool looked at evening, with all the children gone!

And now at this very moment he was below stairs waiting for her, waiting to learn whether she had smiled or her mood had relaxed so that he might come up to plead afresh for so little as she could give—her worthless disinterested company somewhere!

Well, perhaps it was unfair to serve one so who wished nothing more than to be kind and who had striven in every way for several years now to make himself useful if not agreeable to her, and yet—True, she had accepted of his largess, not only for herself but for her mother; but had she not had things of her own before that? And had she not been content? Was it charity from her or from him?

And still—

Those darkening shadows in the sky in the east!

And yet it was always “Ulrica” here and “Ulrica” there. Did she so much as refer to an old-time longing was it not he who attempted to make amends in some way or to bring about a belated fulfilment? Vivian’s painting now in the museum, the talk as to his worth, his monument but now being erected—to whom, to whom were those things due—this belated honoring of her darling—?

“Oh, well, tell him to come up. And you may lay out my green evening dress, Olga.”

XII
THE VICTOR